The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

DIXIE - The illustration is typical for its day: a primitive rendition of the rolling landscape just south of Dixie during the second half of the 19th century, presumably after the end of the Civil War in 1865.

The scene shows an estate with wheat fields, fruit trees, vegetable plots, fences, young trees, horse drawn wagons, a large barn and a proud farm house with a steam train and cattle on the hills in the background.

Underneath the detailed undated drawing, it reads "Farm Residence Of Honorable J.M. Cornwell, Walla Walla County, Washington Territory."

Fast forward to 2011.

Some aspects of the landscape at the Cornwell Blankenship estate have changed. The dirt road that shows the passing wagon in the foreground is now Highway 12. The farm house is sheltered by the much taller locusts that rustle gently on a spring breeze. And the master of the estate, seen pulling away in a wagon by the front porch in the engraving, is now Andy Pryor, a descendant of James Cornwell who still manages the Dixie homestead.

Pryor always knew that his ancestors were prominent pioneers in the northern part of Walla Walla County. He always knew that a young Cornwell, who made it west from Missouri and Indiana with his brother Francis in the early 1850s, arrived in the valley in 1861 and later became one of the first representatives in the Washington State Legislature.

But it wasn't until a cyber search led him to the Washington State Digital Archives that he discovered there was a picture of the "First General Assembly Of 1889" with Cornwell in it.

"When I checked a few years ago, there wasn't much there," Pryor said about the online historical resource.

But the state's Digital Archives, the first in the nation dedicated specifically to the preservation of electronic records for both state and local agencies, have quietly grown into a vast source for all sorts of documents once only viewable on location and now accessible on line.

Andy Pryor and Lindsay Pryor, his niece who works at the Elections Department of the Secretary of State's Office in Olympia, have come up with a lot of items of interest to their family's past.

The shield- shaped emblem with the oval pictures of bearded and moustachioed legislators is one of them. The swearing-in documents of Andy Pryor's father, Thomas Pryor, director of Emergency Management Services under Gov. Dan Evans, is another.

Lindsay Pryor found all sorts of early census data about the family on a search separate from her uncle's.

"History is of value to our family," said Andy Pryor, whose great grandfather Oliver Cornwell (son of James) served three sessions in the Washington Legislature and whose mother, Nancy Blankenship, worked in the Washington Room of the State Library in Olympia.

"Many of these (fragile, sometimes light-sensitive) are at risk of disappearing," he said. "I'm thankful Sam has stepped forward and done this."

His niece concurs.

"I was just blown away by all the documents I could pull up on my family," she said.

Sam, of course, isn't Uncle Sam, but Sam Reed, Washington's Secretary of State, who proposed the gargantuan documentation project soon after he was elected in 2001.

"You want to do what?" legislators asked him. But he pushed on and now a facility designed as a data base store house with a research room and high tech classroom exists in Cheney as the hub of recorded state history.

More than 100 million records have been preserved (28 million of them searchable), thanks to the work of 160 volunteers (whom Reed likes to call "obsessive genealogists") who continue to add thousands every day.

A quick check of the Digital Archives' website shows a recently added black and white photograph of the Boeing Clipper flying over a misty Mount Rainier in 1941 and updates visitors to what the staff has accomplished so far this month: 132,126 records added.

"It's been very successful," Reed said during an interview on a visit to Waitsburg last week.

Reed is right if the accolades from genealogists are any indication. The Digital Archives has won numerous awards from the likes of Family Tree and Ancestry magazines during the past seven years. It also won praise from the National Electronics Commerce Coordinating Council for its "excellence in using technology for the preservation of information.

It was information that first spurred Andy Pryor to start the search that led him to the Digital Archives - information to help register the sprawling old barn, the first structure to be built on his ancestors' land in 1868.

The man who built the barn and homestead was married to Mary Ann Stott and had seven children. Andy Pryor, the sixth generation Washingtonian, and Lindsay Pryor, the seventh generation, are descendant from Oliver Cornwell, whose legislative assignments in Olympia included municipal corporations, education, industrial insurance, irrigation, public utilities, roads and bridges, rules, banks and banking.

Oliver Cornwell has been credited with organizing the campaign to establish the commission form of government in Walla Walla, where he was president of the Walla Walla County Lumber Company, and a charter member of the People's State Bank and Farmers Agency.