OUR BOARD MEMBERS
Vice President - Kim Viner
Kim is a 6th generation resident of Laramie. After graduating from UW in 1973, he entered the U.S. Navy and retired with the rank of Commander after 20 years of service. He is also a graduate of the Naval Postgraduate School. His interest in local history began while serving as a senior docent at the Laramie Plains Museum and served one term on its board of directors. He is currently a docent at the Wyoming Women's History House. He is a benefactor of both museums. He has received numerous awards from the Wyoming Historical Society for books, articles, event planning, and social media posts. This is his second stint on the ACHS Board of Directors.
Secretary - Carol Frost
Carol takes a long view of history, going back to the Precambrian. She came to Laramie in 1983 to take a faculty position in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Wyoming. Her research focused on the geology of Wyoming’s oldest rocks, so beautifully exposed in the state’s mountain ranges. She enjoys local history, especially exploring how people relate to the landscape and how the landscape shapes us.
Treasurer - D. Claudia Thompson
D. Claudia Thompson was an archivist at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, for 35 years. She headed the Arrangement & Description Department, which produced finding aids for the Center’s collections. She has given numerous public presentations on historical topics and has published historical and professional articles in Montana: The Magazine of Western History, The American Archivist, and Annals of Wyoming. She retired in 2020 and now enjoys an active life reading, singing, line dancing, and practicing tai chi.
Alan Ver Ploeg
Alan is currently a retired (2016) geologist after a 39-year career at the Wyoming State Geological Survey working in oil and gas and geologic mapping in the State of Wyoming. Prior to moving to Laramie in 1976, he worked as a minerals and energy manager with the BLM in Rawlins Wyoming for two years (1974-1976). Born and raised in Iowa, he graduated from Iowa State University in 1970 (BS degree) with a double major in Geology and History and an MS degree in Geology in 1973. Alan has always had an interest in western history and has been a member of the Wyoming Historical Society since the early 1980s. He has a strong interest in local history and an avid collector of early photography related to Wyoming history and personalities.
Emma Comstock
Emma was born and raised in Southwest Wyoming and graduated from Lander Valley High School. She went on to earn her Associate's in History from Northwest College in Powell and her B.A. in history from the University of Wyoming in 2022. Her later studies during her undergrad, including her capstones, focused on medieval women's history. Emma works for the American Heritage Center's Toppan Rare Books Library as an Archives Specialist. She gave a talk in May 2024 at the Midwest Archives Conference about the Toppan family and her process of reassembling Eliza Toppan's library that, until then, had been hidden within the greater Fred and Clara Toppan Collection. Emma's other work with Wyoming history examined Laramie's red-light district from a social historical perspective. She is currently working on her Master's in Library and Information Science.
Jane Nelson
Jane is proud to be a fourth-generation Wyomingite whose great-grandfather arrived here in 1868. She was born in Laramie and graduated from the University of Wyoming. She and her spouse then moved to Utah to earn graduate degrees. She taught at Texas A&M University before returning to Laramie in 1982, where she worked at UW until retirement in 2011. She is now pursuing an ever-growing interest in local and regional history and in genealogical research. She has been a member of the Albany County Historical Society for some thirty years and has frequently served on its board.
President - Jan Botkin Therkildsen
Jan was raised in Laramie and also lived for 10 years on a Heart Mountain farm between Powell and Cody. She's a University of Wyoming graduate, and retired after 25 years as an accountant/strategic analyst with the U.S. Dept. of the Interior in Denver. She served 2010-2022 on the David Westphall Veterans Foundation Board, which supports the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Angel Fire, NM -- a place she's volunteered for 30+ years with and for her generation's heroes. She’s always pursued the history of places she’s lived/visited, and her interest in history has expanded over her many years of genealogy research. She returned to Laramie in 2021, and she appreciates contributing to ACHS Board projects and learning more about Albany County's history.
Diana Denison
Diana Denison’s writing focuses on the history of a Wyoming valley and its headwaters. She recently completed a master’s in American studies, focusing on the history of the American West and its Anglo-American influences. Her research focused on how value was created in late nineteenth-century stained glass, drawn from her experience interning at Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum in Scotland. Diana’s thesis interpreted one colorful window in the Gem City on the Plains. Diana now holds a position at Wyoming Public Media, a Laramie-based radio station. She spends most of her free time biking, skiing, and hiking in the mountains near Laramie.
Kathy “Kat” Bunker
Kathy (Kat) Bunker was raised on a ranch in Northern Colorado south of Jelm. She attended a one room schoolhouse in her 1st and 2nd grades with 14 students between 1st and 8th grades. The family moved to Laramie where her father owned Laramie Aviation for 30 years. She graduated from Laramie High in 1972 and briefly attended UW. Since returning to Laramie after retiring, she has been active with the Albany County Genealogical Society, serving as Secretary for the past 2 years. From an early age Kat had an interest in pioneer and early western life. She is currently organizing notes about her family’s history as they settled in Denver in the early 1870’s.
