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Descendants of Jesse Edward Boell
Generation No. 1
1. PROFESSOR JESSE EDWARD5 BOELL (EDWIN ALBERT4, JOHN CALVIN3, JOHANN2, GEORG MELCHOIR1 BOLL) was born September 25, 1899 in Roca, Lancaster Co., NEBRASKA, and died August 31, 1991 in Madison, Dane Co., WISCONSIN. He married ELLEN ELOISE KEEFER August 22, 1936. She was born June 24, 1908, and died in Madison, Dane Co., WISCONSIN.
Notes for PROFESSOR JESSE EDWARD BOELL:
Jesse married Ellen Eloise Keefer on 22 August, 1936.
Jesse was in the Navy during WWI, graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan where he was
a member of the basketball and football teams. He then went to the University
of Nebraska where he obtained his Master's degree.
Sources: Miriam Seely (Boell) Bogel; Madison WI. Nebraska Wesleyan Yearbook,
"Coyote", 1925.
Jesse Boell's Labor of Love
Just for the Record: UW Can Boast of It's Excellent Archives
by Hazel McGrath
With more than 150 tons of records carefully stored in air-conditioned
quarters in two modern campus buildings, the University of Wisconsin-Madison
can boast perhaps the most complete archives of any university in the country.
That's the informed opinion of Jesse E. Boell, recently retired UW
archivist, who has spent many years assembling, labeling, filing, and
cherishing them.
"There is no attic or basement or temporary building on the campus I've not
searched for valuable records," he admits.
* * *
On one occasion, walking past Agricultural Hall, he noticed some
overflowing trash barrels waiting to be carted away.
"They had discarded the KIVLIN files," he remembers with a shudder of pure
horror. "We grabbed them and took them over to the archives to be sorted."
(Vincent E. Kivlin was for 40 years a professor and administrator in the
College of Agriculture.)
"On more than one occasion a department chairman has asked his secretary to
clean out the files, and she's throw(n) everything away," he mourns.
There is plenty left. In addition to books, films, pamphlets, records,
reports, photographs, portraits, letters, minutes, tapes, and clippings, the
archives contain such memorabilia as the large silver loving cup with bone
handles inscribed: "To John Bascom, President of the University, 1874-1887,
From His Students."
There is the bronze bas-relief profile of Thomas E. Brittingham, UW
graduate and benefactor, presented "in grateful memory" by the Scandinavian
scholars he brought to the Madison campus.
* * *
There are the dogs used by the late Prof. Harry Steenbock, famed UW
biochemist, in his Vitamin D experiments that improved the nutrition of half
the world, now reposing, stuffed, in wooden boxes on a high shelf.
Stored on two levels of the Memorial Library are such items as central
administration records, financial reports, budget books, and committee minutes;
all UW publications from the first handwritten copy of the Athenaean to the
latest issue of the Badger Yearbook; complete papers of all presidents from Van
Hise, with scattered ones of his predecessors; catalogs back to 1852 and
student directories back to 1888. There are tapes of the sociology course
broadcast over WHA-TV by the late Prof. Howard Becker; files on the arboretum,
the Center system, and Extension; and 32,000 pictures of people, buildings,
landscapes, and athletic events.
In the recently acquired basement quarters in Steenbock library are housed
more than 6,000 cubic feet of records of University Extension, the Medical
School, the State Laboratory of Hygiene, and the agricultural college; books
and pamphlets written by UW professors; a mint copy of each publication of the
UW Press; and complete student records filed alphabetically and
Chronologically.
* * *
"We keep the student files as insurance against problems with micro-films
and such demonstrations as wrecked some of the L and S offices in South Hall in
1968," Boell explains.
These records were recently transferred to Steenbock from the third and
fourth floors of the stadium. Boell's successor, J. Frank Cook, and some of
his assistants, moved all 70 tons onto the 15,000 feet of bright new shelves.
"To save the University the cost of commercial movers they rented a truck
and did it themselves," Boell says.
"We still have young people around who are willing to work," Cook adds.
"This was probably the most highly educated moving crew in the history of the
world, for all of us have at least the master's degree."
Boell was born in Nebraska, earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees in American
history at the University of Nebraska. From 1936 to 1941 he was Wisconsin
state director of the national historical records survey, a WPA project during
the depression that employed 350 men and women around the state and issued
approximately 100 publications.
* * *
Following experience with the National Archives in Washington and Germany,
Boell was in 1947 named state archivist for the Wisconsin State Historical
Society and secretary of the committee on public records, to handle disposal of
state records.
"Until then they could get rid of them only by passing a bill in the
Legislature," he reveals.
In 1951, when UW archivist Gilbert Doane went on leave to write a book,
Boell was asked to take over. In 1959 he was named associate professor and
director of UW archives, in 1962 full professor and University archivist.
"The program really started when Profs. Merle Curti and Vernon Carstensen
were writing their two-volume history of the University and found the records
in appalling shape. Vernon and I went through stuff and threw some out, and I
set up a filing system, as well as a classification and cataloging system, to
keep track of the things we kept."
* * *
Training in history is essential to evaluate records, Boell believes, the
archivist must know about research, must have a decent judgment of what is
useful. Frank Cook, for example, has a Wisconsin Ph.D. in history."
"We now have about 6,000 reference requests a year. The questions we get
are of great variety, on every aspect of University history. We want people to
use the material. We're always trying to encourage people to write about some
of the great professors and programs we have here, for a University is measured
by the caliber of the scholars and research connected with it.
"This business of retirement. If you're interested in what you're doing,
it's the end, dammit. I want to phase out gradually, so they've given me an
office upstairs where I'm preparing a handbook for University archivists.
Since I've been here through the whole growth of our archives I can do the book
in a third the time it would take anyone else."
* * *
Over the years he has won awards from the American Association of State and
Local History and the Wisconsin library association of State and Local History
and the Wisconsin library association, as well as high praise for the condition
of the archives from scholars who have used them.
Framed on his office wall is the professional code he's lived by, as
expressed by the archivist of the United States, Wayne C. Grover:
"The archivist has a moral obligation to preserve evidence on how things
actually happened and to take every preservation of valuable records. On the
other hand, he has an obligation not to commit funds to the housing and care of
records that have no significant or lasting value."
Or, in Jesse Boell's own words: "Save the good stuff, throw away the junk."
Source: The Capital Times; Madison, WI; Sep 4, 1971. Received from Capital
Times, September 1996. NOTE: The article includes 2 photos: 1) Jesse holding
the silver loving cup inscribed in John Bascom's honor; 2) The composite
picture of College of Agriculture faculty and the 1905 graduating class.
Faculty then included such well-remembered men as Dean W. A. Henry and Profs.
Harry L. Russell, Stephen M. Babcock, C. I. King, and R. A. Moore.
Boell, Jesse E.
Madison - Jesse E. Boell, age 91, died on Saturday, August 31, 1991. He was
born on September 25, 1899 in Hickman, Nebraska. Jesse was a graduate of
Nebraska Wesleyan University and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He
served in the US Navy in WWI. He also served as part of the military
government for Germany following WWII. He worked for the National Archives in
Washington D.C., the State Historical Society, and he was the first director of
the UW Madison Archives until 1971 when he retired. He was a UW Madison
emeritus professor of History. Jesse is survived by his wife, Eloise (Keefer)
Boell; a daughter, Miriam (Brian) Boegel of Madison; two grandchildren, Andrew
and Laura Boegel; two sisters-in-law, Christine Morris and Dorothy Boell; and a
brother-in-law, Joe Lawson. Private funeral services will be at the ST.
ANDREW'S EPISCOPAL CHURCH. Arrangements are by the CRESS FUNERAL HOME, 3610
Speedway Rd. Memorials may be made to St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Madison,
Trinity Episcopal Church, Mineral Point, or the Meriter Foundation.
More About PROFESSOR JESSE EDWARD BOELL:
Burial: Madison, Dane Co., WISCONSIN
Notes for ELLEN ELOISE KEEFER:
!Source: Miriam Sealy (Boell) Bogel; Madison, Wisconsin.
More About ELLEN ELOISE KEEFER:
Burial: Madison, Dane Co., WISCONSIN
Child of JESSE BOELL and ELLEN KEEFER is:
2. i. MIRIAM SEALY6 BOELL, b. July 01, 1945, Madison, Dane Co., WISCONSIN.
Generation No. 2 2. MIRIAM SEALY6 BOELL (JESSE EDWARD5, EDWIN ALBERT4, JOHN CALVIN3, JOHANN2, GEORG MELCHOIR1 BOLL) was born July 01, 1945 in Madison, Dane Co., WISCONSIN. She married BRIAN MARK BOGEL August 17, 1968 in Madison, Dane, WISCONSIN. He was born March 23, 1939 | 
