Charlene Garcia Simms is a librarian, genealogist and archivist. She has been a member of GSHA since 1989 and is a founder of the Fray Angelico Chavez Chapter in that same year. She served as president of FACC for six years and has been  a member of several committees. She also served as vice-president and president of GSHA where she has helped coordinate several annual conferences and was the editor of their newsletter, Nuestras Raices for ten years. She is currently the chapter representative for FACC on the GSHA board. Charlene grew up in Garcia and has written a memoir about growing up there among her grandparents, great-grandmother, tias and tios and  many cousins, vecinos and others. She has done extensive research on her Manchego, Cordova, Garcia, Martinez, Lopez and Medina genealogy lines. 

 

She was the genealogy and special collections librarian at the Rawlings Library in Pueblo for thirteen years. She now lives in Denver but works remotely as the project archivist at CSU-Pueblo. Her husband, Ed, and Charlene owned El Escritorio Publishing and Research for almost thirty years publishing several books on history and genealogies of the Southwest. She is a board member on History Colorado’s Center for Colorado Women’s History, and a member of the Colorado Alliance of Latino Mentors and Authors (CALMA). Her greatest pride is her three children, daughter-in-laws, and two grandsons.