Helen Hoffman Collar

Summary

Helen Hoffman Collar (4 January 1902 – 9 January 1996) was a geologist, artist and, above all, the historian of Beaver Island’s Irish settlement. She first came to the island as a teenager in 1915, when her father built the family a cabin on the North Beach, and summered there for eighty years while wintering at the family farm near Crawfordsville, Indiana. She contributed the first “Know Your Neighbor” retrospective to the September 1964 Beaver Beacon, and from 1972 wrote a history of the island’s Irish settlement, published in the Journal of Beaver Island History and the University of Michigan History Bulletin, alongside portraits of the first-generation Irish immigrants now held at the Print Shop Museum. She died in Arlington, Virginia on 9 January 1996, age 94, five days after her birthday.

Biography

Helen Hoffman was born 4 January 1902 in Ottawa, Illinois, to U. J. and Ella Hoffman, who moved the family to Springfield, Illinois, in 1907. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 1924 with a degree in geology and worked for an oil company in St. Louis from 1924 to 1927. She first came to Beaver Island as a teenager in 1915, after her father built a family cabin on the North Beach — a first visit her September 1964 retrospective in the Beacon separately dates to July of that year.

In 1927 she married George C. Collar, an executive with the R. R. Donnelley Company; the couple bought a farm outside Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1936, which became their year-round home. George Collar died in 1940. For the rest of her life Helen Collar divided her year between that Indiana farm and Beaver Island, where she continued to summer.

Beginning in 1972 — by her own account, the start of “the second half of her life,” in her grandson Josh Broder’s later description — Collar undertook a sustained history of the island’s Irish settlement, working from genealogical and oral sources rather than the “computers, or even copy machines” a 1996 letter to the editor notes she worked without. Portions of that history appeared as articles in the Journal of Beaver Island History and the University of Michigan History Bulletin. She also painted portraits of the island’s first-generation Irish immigrants, a set held at the Print Shop Museum. Her wide-ranging research and biographical notes on island families and events are transcribed in the Helen Collar Papers web collection and held by the Clarke Historical Library at Central Michigan University.

Failing health moved her from Beaver Island to Arlington, Virginia, in 1995, to live near her daughter. She died there on 9 January 1996, of heart failure, at age 94 — five days after her ninety-fourth birthday. She was survived by a son, William G. Collar of Camp Springs, Maryland; a daughter, Ann Collar Broder of Arlington; four grandsons; and six great-grandchildren.

Significance

Collar’s Irish-settlement history and family research remain a primary secondary source here and for the island’s own historical society; a February 1996 letter to the Beacon editor from local historian Rich Gillespie credits her with having “created the interest in preserving our history, long before anyone else, and the template for doing so,” and states his own genealogical work — some 2,000 names — draws heavily on hers. Her biographical papers are also a primary source behind the Squaw Island naming research.

Evidence and limits

The 1964 Beacon byline, the Clarke Historical Library finding aid, and Collar’s own February 1996 Beacon obituary agree on her identity and research career and converge on her exact birth (4 January 1902) and death (9 January 1996) dates; the obituary is the source for her early biography, marriage, and family, and for the cause, place, and age at death. Her grandson’s accompanying tribute is a eulogy, used here only for its characterization of her and its account of her earliest island memory, not as an independent record of dates or facts. No source read for this article documents her Print Shop Museum portraits’ full extent, gives publication dates or volume numbers for her Journal of Beaver Island History or University of Michigan History Bulletin articles, or establishes where her original research papers are physically held beyond the Clarke Historical Library’s finding aid and the web transcriptions already cited.

Added 2 August 2026 · revised 5 August 2026. Recent changes