Barbara Giffen (1920-1991) was born in Sacramento and graduated from U.C. Berkeley in with a degree in history. Barbara moved to Santa Cruz in 1946 and served as an elementary school teacher in Santa Cruz, teaching fourth grade at Westlake school for many years. Her classes were encouraged to study local history through a series of field trips and theatrical pageants. In the mid-1970s, the University of California at Santa Cruz library purchased the photograph collection of local historian Preston Sawyer and the difficult task of organizing and evaluating the images of movie companies on location in Santa Cruz County was assigned to Barbara. She worked for four years as a volunteer on the project. Her research files are part of this collection. The collection represents Barbara Giffen’s work as a school teacher in addition to her research files on local film history.
