PRELIMINARY INVENTORY S1222 (SA4358) GEOFFREY WADE DONNAN PAPERS This collection is available at The State Historical Society of Missouri. If you would like more information, please contact us at
[email protected]. Introduction Approximately 16 cubic feet, 472.9 GB The papers of Geoffrey Wade Donnan contain correspondence, family histories, photographs, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings relating to Geoffrey Wade Donnan’s research on the Donnan, Wessel, Schaefer, and Coe families. Throughout his research, Donnan collected and maintained his relative’s papers, including his parent’s, Dwight and Gloria Donnan, correspondence, which constitutes the bulk of the collection. Materials of interest include Dwight’s letters to Gloria during World War II, in which he served as a staff sergeant in the 255th Infantry Regiment, 63rd Infantry Division. Dwight recounts to Gloria crossing the Rhine River into Germany, as well as encountering German prisoners of war. The collection also contains a digital component, approximately 473 gigabytes of digitized family photographs, census records, and death certificates. Included in the digital materials are oral history interviews Geoffrey Donnan conducted with Dwight Donnan on the history of the Donnan family. The materials in this collection date from 1854 to 2015. Geoffrey Wade Donnan was born on November 5, 1943, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Dwight Andrew Donnan and Gloria Wessel Donnan. Donnan married Nancy Nuottila in September 1968 and began a career in marketing for Proctor and Gamble. The unexpected death of his second child in the early 1970s led him to convert to Christianity and embark on a second career as a minister, founding Caribbean Christian Ministries in 1980, and later Reformation Christian Ministries in 1997 in Fellsmere, Florida.