About us...

1st-hand-history.org is a not-for-profit, section 501(c)(3) public benefit corporation, founded in the state of Oregon in May of 2001. We initially incorporated as the "1st-hand-history Foundation" and recently changed our name to "1st-hand-history.org" to simplify promotion and fundraising. We are supported by tax-deductible contributions and the labor of volunteers.

Our mission is to make rare historical documents available to the public without charging admission or access fees. To that end, we are building and promoting our archive on this web site. We also encourage libraries and other institutions to make their collections available in the same manner, and to expand their collections by promoting and linking to our web-site.

Our board of directors and Executive Director are all volunteers.

At this time, 1st-hand-history.org has no paid employees. However, as funding allows, we plan to hire a few part-time employees to process our backlog (over 100,000 pages) of documents onto the web.