Goodbye to Another Longtime StLGS Volunteer and Some New Maps on Our Website

Another of our valued StLGS volunteers has passed away, and we share an "In Memoriam" this week to our former remote data entry team leader, Mary Ryan. We'll fill you in next week on upcoming April events, but meanwhile, please use the Annual Family History Conference and Calendar of Events pages on our website for the latest news. Registration has opened for our annual Salt Lake City Research trip, and, in addition, we want to tell you about two new mapping resources uploaded recently to our website, so please keep reading.

In Memoriam: Mary (Howard) Ryan

We learned this week that our dear friend, Mary Ryan, passed away on Tuesday, 18 March 2025. Mary began to volunteer at StLGS in the late 1990s, working from home on indexing data. After marrying and raising a family, Mary worked outside her home beginning in the 1970s as an early user of comptometers, "the first commercially successful key-driven mechanical calculators," and she continued to enhance her computer skills as technology changed. She eventually stepped into a lead role at the StLGS office, coordinating and supervising cemetery, funeral home, and congregation indexing projects, assigning indexing jobs to other volunteers, and assisting her teammates as they plowed through illegible handwriting, odd spelling, Excel spreadsheets, and Dropbox uploads and downloads. She was never too busy to stop and help anyone who needed an explanation or assistance solving a problem. Mary's bright smile filled any room she was in, and she was always ready to tackle new problems with optimism and infinite patience.

StLGS showed its appreciation for Mary's skills by honoring her with multiple awards. She received a Certificate of Appreciation in 2006, a Certificate of Achievement in 2008, and an Honorary Life Membership in 2010. In 2018, then-president, Kay Weber, bestowed the society's Special Recognition award on Mary.

When health issues forced her to slow down in 2020, she worked side by side with colleagues to maintain continuity in all the ongoing indexing projects. She trained the new leadership and continued to answer dozens of questions from home, finally retiring in 2021. Her cadre of indexing "regulars" described her, quite rightly, as "unselfish, giving, practical, down-to-earth, and the heart of the StLGS indexing group." 

When she wasn't working for the society, Mary enjoyed spending time with her family and friends. She had a wide variety of interests, including sewing and other crafts, gardening, canning, making pickles, and spending time at her family's farm in Madison County, Missouri, where she was also involved with the local historical society. We extend our sincere condolences to Mary's sister, Dorothy Asinger, who also used to volunteer for StLGS, and Mary's children: Patricia, Michael and his wife Amy, Jean, Kevin, Sharon, and James, and their families.

❀

Two New Map Resources Added to Our Website

If you had ancestors in St. Louis in the mid-nineteenth century, you will be excited to learn that we have two wonderful new map resources available on our website.

In 1838, Dupre's Atlas of the City and County of St. Louis was published. The atlas included surveys of public land and French and Spanish land grants extending to New Madrid, and we have indexed all the landowners. The maps are divided by neighborhoods and by township/range. As you click on each map, the names of the landowners will populate below the map. There are links to the exact location of each person's property with township, range, and number of acres for each person. St. Louis was still relatively new, and these were its earliest settlers. You may recognize names like Biddle, Bompart, Chouteau, Easton, Gratiot, and many more that remain to this day as names of streets. 

Search this new resource on the Dupre's 1838 Atlas main page.

In 1850, a man called Julius Hutawa created a Plan of the City of St. Louis, Mo. that included steamboat routes and points of interest. Have you wondered what the City of St. Louis looked like in 1850? Where were some of the churches, hospitals, cemeteries, and other points of interest? How many miles to get from St. Louis to San Francisco via Cape Horn? (17,000!) All these are part of Hutawa's map pages on our website. You can start exploring this fascinating piece of St. Louis history here. 

Many thanks to our friends at the Missouri Historical Society for giving us permission to use their digital images, and to our map guru and co-webmaster, Jim Bellenger, for all the work required to index, geo-reference, and upload the maps to our website.