Clark County commissions work

October 22, 2009 by Victoria Gonzalez 

Student pens book on history of commissioners’ seat

Contributing to Clark County’s history, one graduate student has compiled a book that will be available at all locations of the CLark County Libraries.

Angela Moor, a UNLV student working on her doctorate in history, wrote a book titled, “Clark County Commissioners, 1909-2009: A Century of Service,” which was published by the county this fall.

The 186-page book, which the was commissioned by the county, was put together for the Clark County Centennial Celebration.

It addresses about the first 100 years of the Clark County Commissioner’s office and contains a sketch of each commissioner appointed or elected during the last century.

“The book is composed of biographies of each county commissioner to serve in Clark County since the county was established,” Moor said.

Collecting research, writing and laying out the book took about a year.

Moor said that the process of researching the lives of the county commissioners was very interesting.

“Some of them were very well known and were easy to research because they had been written about in the newspaper or other books,” Moor said. “For many of them, though, I had to do a lot of in-depth research including obituaries, census records, newspaper microfilm, genealogical research and just a lot of digging.”

Now used to the research that the book would require, Moor works on oral history projects as a research assistant at the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada at UNLV.

According to a Clark County news release, the short biographies in her book offer a new look at the types of individuals who participated in public service from the county’s early days, when it was sparsely populated and newly established, to the present.

The short biographies on each of the commissioners also come with pictures, where they were available. Some of the commissioners were obscure figures that did not leave many clues behind about their lives.

For Dorothy Wright, Clark County Centennial program administrator and editor of Moor’s book, the book provides county residents with a chance to learn something about their county’s history. “The county’s year of activities was more history-oriented because we have the Clark County Museum in Henderson,” Wright said.

The book might have been history itself if Wright had not thought of publishing the project. “The book started out as an online only project, but I thought that publishing it in book form would mean that it wouldn’t disappear at the end of the Centennial year,” Wright said.

Wright said Moor’s book is a real contribution to the county’s knowledge about early, and even recent, history of Clark County.

She also said that the book is going to be placed in all public libraries and at the school district high school libraries.
“Angela researched for almost a year and found information that isn’t available in any history book I know of,” Wright said. “It’s also just fun to read, written clearly and I think anyone would find it interesting.”

Moor said she would love to write another book and is planning to do so after she graduates with her Ph.D. in history.
“It is hard work, but very rewarding when you see the final product and how it is useful to people,” Moor said.
The book will be available for free, while supplies last, at the Clark County Museum in Henderson.