John Ellis Hale is a past president of CGS serving from 1979 to 1982. Mr. Hale was a dedicated family historian/researcher who spent forty years collecting, documenting and writing about his family and ancestors. After his death in 2012 his collection of papers comprising 9 boxes and a tube of large-format documents was donated to CGS by his estate and added to our manuscript collection.
The collection is organized into 64 folders most of which are labelled with a surname. The contents of those folders are not necessarily limited to persons having that surname, nor is the finding aid in any way an all-name index. Some surnames are spread over several folders, and there are separate folders for several individual Hales as well as for former Arkansas Governor Thomas C. McRae (1851-1929). There are also two folders labelled Photos and a tube of large-format documents (Box 10).
CGS volunteer Georgia Lupinsky composed a finding aid for the contents in 2017. In 2020 as part of a project to expand the online resources available to members Stewart Traiman reviewed every document in the collection, creating a greatly expanded finding aid, and scanned the documents which CGS can publish online either because they were created by Mr. Hale, are government documents (and therefore in the public domain) or were published before 1925 and therefore whose copyrights have expired. A few other documents were held back because they provide private information about people who may still be living. Those scanned images are linked in the new finding aid; those documents which we are unable to publish online are indicated with the note “Please visit the library”. Note that the Manuscript Collection is available only by appointment.