Introduction

General - These documents are related to the 1948 adoption by Morganville, Kansas of the war-battered French village of F�ves in Lorraine, France. They are primarily of a text nature - letters, newspaper articles, etc. Graphics, such as diagrams and photographs, were included only when they were part of the original document and considered essential to understanding the document's content. To the degree it was possible, they are listed in chronological order.

These documents were used as original source material for the story. Since they are not needed to understand the story, they were not translated into French. If a document was originally written in French, the English translation is included here.


Sources - Documents were obtained from three major sources:

Source 1: Carson papers - Velma Carson wrote the 4,500-word pageant script and was the head of the Morganville-F�ves committee in Morganville. In the fall of 2013, Gould Colman, Carson's son-in-law, donated some of her papers to Kansas State University's special collections department of Hale Library. Many of those items were related to the village adoption. In 2016, Colman donated several additional boxes of papers.

Source 2: Clay County Historical Society museum - Cathy Haney, long-time curator of the CCHS museum, was present at the pageant and collected much material related to the adoption.

Source 3: Other - While no other single source provided as many documents as either of the other two, additional useful material was found in newspapers, school publications, Internet websites and in private collections such as items in the possession of Mr. G�rard Torlotting, the nephew of the F�ves schoolmaster.

"MF - Documents" identifies the page as being in the DOCUMENTS area of the Morganville-F�ves website. "010649" indicates the individual document's name - in this case, an item dated January 6, 1949. If there is more than one document for a date, each is assigned a unique lower-case letter commencing with "a" appended to the date digits.

"CCHS" identifies the document's source as being the Clay County Historical Society museum. A listing of the source codes and the corresponding source are at the page bottom.

An item's ultimate source may be indicated or the source where it was obtained may be identified. For example: many of the documents were articles in the now-defunct Morganville Tribune newspaper. These items were copied from the newspaper holdings of the Clay County Historical Society museum and the museum was listed as the source.