Henry F. Gibbard III
Office of Staff Counsel
Frank Gibbard was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Southern Illinois. He has lived in Colorado since 1983, when he married his college sweetheart Christine and moved to her hometown of Fort Collins. He has two children, one of whom is a sophomore at the University of Colorado and the other a high school junior. Frank is a 1990 graduate of the University of Wyoming College of Law, where he was awarded the Order of the Coif and served as Justice (president) of Phi Alpha Delta law fraternity. After a clerkship with Justice G. Joseph Cardine of the Wyoming Supreme Court, he worked in private practice in Cheyenne before assuming his present position as a staff attorney at the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver in 1995. Since 2003 he has also served as Secretary of the Tenth Circuit Historical Society.
On his mother’s side, Frank is descended from lowland Scots and Irishmen who came to this country so long ago that their exact point of departure has been forgotten. His grandfather Harral Scott managed to trace the family back to the early 1700s but had still not found his way back to the Old Country. His father’s people are more recent immigrants, some of whose distant cousins still resided in Dunstable, England when Frank visited them there in 1981.
Frank’s ancestors were already living in Oklahoma before statehood. As a child, his great-grandmother, born in 1892, fascinated him with tales of her childhood picking cotton in Alabama. His grandmothers also regaled him with stories of their ancestors in Oklahoma and Texas, who traded with the Indians, made fortunes in the oil business, stole horses, preached to the drunks on skid row, and sometimes drank to excess themselves. His great-aunt Helen Gibbard Hall wrote a number of books on North Texas history, and two of his relatives are honored with busts in the Cowboy Hall of Fame.
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