Orphanages, Newspapers, and Congregations: Some Updates

As we mentioned to you a few weeks ago, we are in the process of reviewing many outdated blog posts in preparation for moving to our new website. Although many of the oldest posts were short and restricted to events occurring at specific times and places, some are still quite relevant, and we want to share some of those this week.

June StLGS Meetings and Classes

Summer is almost here, and we are excited to bring you some great upcoming meetings. We have one class scheduled for this coming weekend, and we want to remind you about the deadlines for registering for our Salt Lake City Research Trip or watching the digital recordings of the Family History Conference. Here's what's on tap for June . . . 

Updated Congregations Maps Added to the StLGS Website!

Suppose you had a female ancestor who lived in St. Louis in the 1860s, but you couldn’t discover her birth date. There are no statewide birth records in Missouri prior to 1910, and, although the City of St. Louis kept a birth register, compliance was not compulsory; hence, it is incomplete. Religious records would be very helpful, as births, baptisms, confirmations, and other life events were usually recorded by religious leaders and kept on site. You know where your ancestor lived and what religion her family practiced, but how do you know what congregations were active at the time she was born? A new set of congregations maps is now live on our website, and an exciting feature of the maps is the ability to see exactly which churches and synagogues were open in the city and county at any given time. Let’s take a look!

StLGS Congregations Index Pages Now Include Maps to Locate Churches and Synagogues

More maps for our website! Yes, we have spent a lot of time and energy recently on maps, but they are so incredibly valuable for genealogists, that we feel it’s worth devoting more than the usual amount of attention to them. During this past week, our map guru/technology volunteer, Jim Bellenger, uploaded a whole series of locator maps for all of our congregation indexes! That’s right––now you can click on a link and go to an exact location for every church and synagogue for which we have an address in our indexes.

StLGS Congregations Project News and Farewell to Another Volunteer

(Thanks to Carol Whitton, StLGS Projects Director, for contributing the first part of this week's post.)

As you may know, St. Louis Genealogical Society (StLGS) is currently working on a project to identify, index, digitize, and preserve all St. Louis City and County congregational records. We hope all congregations will choose to participate and allow StLGS to put indexes and images of their historical records on our website. Records we are scanning, digitizing, and indexing include baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths, and, in some cases, member lists. During the past ten years, we’ve identified about 1,700 congregations, both historical and existing, in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County. To date, we’ve completed only a tiny fraction, 112 congregations, with more than thirty more underway. Our goal is to help preserve as many records as we can and make them more readily available to family historians. To do this, however, we need more congregations to share their records, and for that, we need your help!