Mother, now daughter, leave marks on history

RUSSELLVILLE — In the event you find yourself on a trip to the Franklin County Archives, one of the first things you’ll see upon arrival is the name Chris Ozbirn in bold white lettering across the side of the building.

As the founder of the county’s archives, Ozbirn is largely credited with researching and obtaining tens of thousands of pages of documents ranging from newspaper clippings to entire family trees — all in the name of preservation.

While Ozbirn passed away in 2024 after serving two decades as the director of the archives, her daughter, Buffie, took over operations at the archives. She works to ensure her mother’s hard work and dedication is continued.

An X-ray technician with Russellville Hospital — a position she has held for 34 years — Buffie works three days a week at the place that now bears her mother’s name.

Looking back on her life, history and genealogy has always played a significant role for Buffie. When her mother began volunteering at the Russellville Public Library around 1988, Buffie would often swing by to see how things were going.

Between research and work during the week and trips to battlefields and museums on the weekends, the Ozbirn family spent most of their time in search of a new historical story to tell.

But one thing was missing — somewhere to store all the information they had obtained.

“She (Chris) had tried to get a legitimate archive started for a long time and I was always right there with her pushing for it too,” Ozbirn said.

Eventually, Buffie and her mother’s persistence paid off as the archives facility officially opened in 2004.

Over the past 22 years of the existence of the archives, the Ozbirn name has been synonymous with Franklin County history.

Preserving her mother’s work drives Buffie to keep returning to the archives each week, but she also possesses the same level of intrigue and desire to uncover more history her mother had.

“I love learning about what people did back in the day, or how many children they had and where they all ended up,” Ozbirn said. “My mother and I would spend a lot of time in cemeteries cleaning headstones and things like that. But there’s something about knowing a person or a family’s story that’s just really exciting.”

Each day she’s at the facility, Ozbirn receives a plethora of calls, emails and letters from individuals who are on their own quest to learn about their own family’s history. One of the recent inquiries she received involved helping out a neighbor who was in search of a deceased relative — who the person believed to be their grandfather — they met as a child.

Sure enough, Ozbirn was able to not only track down the relative in question, but she was also able to confirm it was her neighbor’s great-grandfather while also providing a bit more information on the family’s history.

“That was pretty special to be able to help them out, and that’s really what this is all about,” Ozbirn said. “We want to make sure we keep the records and information so it isn’t lost, but we also want to help people connect with their past as well.”

Today, as she sits at the desk once occupied by her mother, Buffie feels a sense of bittersweet pride each day she arrives at the archives. She is surrounded by her mother’s ambition and lifelong work, represented with each document or artifact found throughout the building. The significance of her mother’s accomplishment is not lost on Buffie, and it’s something she hopes to push forward and leave a mark of her own.

“I’m so proud of the work she did because she worked so hard — mostly all on her own,” Ozbirn said. “I always tell people I’m not as good at this as she was, but I hope I can do my own part and really make her proud of how this has continued.”