Previous Grants Awarded 2006

December 2006
Established in 1967 with 2,000 active members from 46 states, the St. Louis Genealogical Society (StLGS) of St. Louis, Missouri, is an all volunteer organization that offers monthly and quarterly publications; monthly meetings with speakers; Special Interest Groups that hold quarterly meetings for individuals with German, Jewish, French, Irish, African American and/or Scandinavian heritage; preservation of records - naturalization, church, mortuary, and cemetery; annual fair with prominent guest speaker; classes at the Society office, local community college and in the St. Louis public schools; a computer lab at the Society office that offers several genealogy software packages for trial use, as well as access to Ancestry.com and HeritageQuestOnline.com; and annual research trips to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah as well as to Missouri record depositories. Phew!

StLGS is completing a project to index all burials in the St. Louis area cemeteries - one which will result in approximately 1.5 million burial records. The focus now is on early church registers, so grant money will be used to photocopy and microfilm these fragile records. Resulting films will be given to the local church, StLGS office and the Special Collections at the St. Louis County Library. This project will provide archival back-up copies of this data, thereby insuring preservation of the original records in the advent of a fire or other destruction.

November 2006
Richard D. Longo of Rochester, New Hampshire is the first two-time Honoring Our Ancestors grant recipient. Check out his earlier award in October 2001. His organization is 100% volunteer and includes Richard and three others. They are attempting to find, physically verify, and transcribe everything that is written on a headstone, footstone, monument or obelisk in Rochester, and insert it into a computer program that they have created. They also find missing headstones (e.g., bring them to the surface to transcribe the information) and GPS all burial grounds. Now they have been given authorization to repair any broken or damaged headstones that they deem important. This grant will be used for the very practical purchase of epoxy guns, nozzles, boxes of epoxy/drier cartridges, and bags of Sacrete (a sand and cement mixture).

October 2006
The North Dakota State Genealogical Society, based in Bismarck, North Dakota, coordinates projects to promote the history of the families of North Dakota and preserve records. The society recently placed the North Dakota Death Index online by funding the website setup, and has also worked on indexing the 1885 Dakota Territory census, compiling county cemetery indexes, funeral home records, school records and early marriage records. The purpose of this grant will be to support the setup a website for a pre-1925 marriage index for the state. These records are kept in county courthouses and some have been lost due to negligence, damage or misplacement. It is hoped that this initiative will make people more aware of the value of these and all old documents, as well as encourage indexing and reorganization of these records to make them more accessible to the public.

September 2006
The Buckingham County High School Genealogy and Local History Club, run by Jeanne Stinson of Buckingham, Virginia, was recently launched to help students record the oral history and genealogy of their families. This school is not located in an affluent area, so books and even postage can be beyond the reach of many. Jeanne intends to use this grant to obtain books and engage students in the quest for their roots — and, as she so aptly puts it, "to find themselves in the process."

August 2006
Established in 1996, The Hispanic Genealogical Society of New York is a non-profit organization focused on Hispanic ancestry. Its volunteer staff organizes meetings, plan projects, provides instructional forums and seminars, encourages Hispanics to research their roots, offers assistance in genealogical research, and protects and restores historical documents relating to Hispanics and their history. This grant will be used to pay for printing costs of their newsletter Nuestra Herencia (Our Heritage), which recently won the National Genealogical Society's Newsletter Competition's first prize for the second time (2001 and 2005).

July 2006
The Hartington Public Library of Hartington, Nebraska serves the patrons of Cedar County and genealogists across the country with local history resources and microfilmed newspapers. According to director, Tami Anderson, "It is becoming more apparent that the stories and pictures of our early ancestors are being lost due to deaths of our older generation." Tami was recently contacted by a former county resident who now lives in Arizona, but is willing to travel and help preserve this forgotten history for the library. Fortunately, this former resident is a genealogist and retired librarian! Her first project will be to scan old photos from local families and burn them to disc. She'll also help re-organize, index, and otherwise enhance the library's current local history section. This month's grant will assist with this effort.

June 2006
The Great Falls Genealogy Society of Great Falls, MT runs a library for genealogists in the area. The library is completely staffed by volunteers, open to the public, and contains over 5,000 books and other sources for avid researchers. The society's library will use this grant to acquire copies of tribal records for Montana Indian tribes around Great Falls, a topic of great interest to locals and other with roots there. Great Falls is home to the Little Shell tribe of Chippewa Indians; less than 100 miles from the Blackfeet Indian Reservation; less than 100 miles from the Rocky Boys Indian Reservation (Chippewa-Cree tribe); and less than 150 miles from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation (Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes). Also in Montana are the Fort Peck Indian Reservation (Assiniboine and Sioux tribes), Crow Indian Reservation, Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation, and Flathead Indian Reservation.

May 2006
Sylvia Manning of Vermont is a genealogical researcher on a mission. While reading through an old series of newspapers for marriage and death notices, she realized how helpful it would be if they were indexed and made readily available to others. So between 1998 and 2005, she indexed 57 years' worth of weekly papers and posted that index online. Now she's working on a fresh round of projects including one that will be incredibly valuable for anyone with roots in Brandon, Vermont or the surrounding area. The library there has a collection of index cards and information compiled by a local man who passed away. Apparently, the collection includes census records, land information, vital records, civil actions, etc. — and much of it is not available elsewhere. Due to space considerations, the collection is stored in the library's attic, and because some researchers pilfered documents or badly misfiled them, the local librarians have restricted access. Since there are only two librarians, the boxes of index cards and notebooks — that fill shelves that are roughly 6 feet high and 8 feet wide — are mostly untouched these days. Sylvia offered to scan the cards and put them on CDs for accessibility and distribution, and the library has agreed, so Sylvia will use her grant for a scanner to support this project. She's aware that this initiative will take years, but says, "I have the patience to stay with the job until it's completed, even if it turns in to another seven year project like the newspaper project I did." I think the genealogical world could use a few more folks like Sylvia!

April 2006
LaVaun Kraft of Texas recently inventoried and published her second edition of nine Lipscomb County, TX cemeteries. She personally walked each cemetery many times to record names and vital information on the existing tombstones. During the inventory, she discovered that many graves were unmarked or had deteriorating, tin markers. LaVaun will use her grant to purchase small, granite head markers that will record names and birth and death dates. She has already contacted many family members to secure funds to mark their families' graves, and has personally paid for ten markers herself. This donation will help her continue her admirable efforts.

March 2006 (Supplemental Donation)
Keira Murphy, Director of Middle School for Aiken Preparatory School in Aiken, South Carolina, has a passion for genealogy research and uses Ancestry.com as her primary online research tool. She is excited to share this passion with her students in an elective genealogy course to be taught this spring, and requested a three-month subscription to Ancestry.com to facilitate this effort. I contacted MyFamily.com about this request and the company kindly agreed to donate an annual subscription to the school for the benefit of the students. A thousand thank you's to MyFamily.com/Ancestry.com for their generosity!

March 2006
Check out this San Francisco Genealogy website, run by Ron Filion and Pamela Storm Wolfskill, to provide free internet access to genealogical and historical information for San Francisco, California and the surrounding area! To commemorate the Centennial of San Francisco's Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906, the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder's Office is working with sfgenealogy.com to present an historical exhibit based on their internet project, The San Francisco 1906 Earthquake Marriage Project. The Assessor-Recorder's Office is planning a variety of media coverage for the exhibit, which will be displayed at City Hall during the month of April. This month's grant will help Ron and Pam create and stage the exhibit, in order to bring their internet-based article, database and family stories to a wider audience.

February 2006
The Grande Prairie & District Genealogy Society is a regional branch of a provincial society that provides genealogical services to an area known as the "Peace River Country" in Canada. This area extends across Northwestern Alberta across into Northeastern British Columbia. Among the many services the society provides is its award-winning 'Genie in the Library' program. The 'Genie' is a volunteer who spends two hours in the Resource/Research Library Room every Wednesday evening in addition to being 'on call' all the time. The resources in their genealogy library are quite modest, consisting mostly of donated books, indices, atlases/maps, local histories and a dated computer. This grant will be used to expand the reference materials that the Genie will have access to in furthering genealogical research in the area.

January 2006
The Wayne County Public Library of Kenova, West Virginia is launching an on-going oral history project with a "station" set up at each library where individuals and families can come and be recorded. They will also (upon request) travel to local senior housing or nursing homes to collect interviews. As they explain, "Memories of the elderly are fading, thus the stories...we would like to make an effort to preserve this history available in our area so rich with details from the people who experienced significant events or just have memories of family reunions, coal mining, or harvest season." This grant will be used to purchase digital voice recording systems.