Free Genealogy Webinars in September: A Gift from Legacy Family Tree

Who doesn't love free? As we move into fall and perhaps have a bit more indoor time than we had during the summer, we have received a gift of educational webinars from the software company, Legacy Family Tree, and the genealogy website, MyHeritage. They are sponsoring a series of twenty free webinars, called "Webtember: All Genealogy. All September Long," and you can watch each lecture as a livestream or view the digital recordings at your leisure. Here are all the details. . .

St. Louis Hospitals on the StLGS Website

Medical records in almost every state are private, and it is often frustrating knowing that an ancestor may have been in a hospital but not why or where. Unfortunately, we can't solve the "why" problem for you, but if you had an ancestor hospitalized in St. Louis City or County, we have made inroads on the "where." We have long had a page on our website for St. Louis-area hospitals with a link to a list of known hospitals. On that page, you can also find a link to information about the cholera epidemic of 1849 and links to two repositories that have microfilmed registers from the old St. Louis City Hospital for a limited number of years. We are pleased to announce that our hospital list now has been greatly enhanced by webmaster Jim Bellenger, who has also used his map magic skills on a newly designed Google Maps interface, so you can see where each hospital was (or still is).

Welcome to the Digitized Georeferenced Pitzman's 1878 Atlas of St. Louis City and County!

Happy Labor Day! St. Louis Genealogical Society’s volunteers want to help you celebrate this holiday weekend with a special gift to everyone, regardless of your StLGS membership status. Our amazing map guru, Jim Bellenger, has been laboring for months on an indexed, digitized version of one of the classic and beloved resources for twentieth-century St. Louis city and county residents, the 1878 Pitzman atlas. Pitzman’s New Atlas of the City and County of Saint Louis contains pages of detailed maps showing locations of specific landowners and many of the structures on their properties, as well as other landmarks, such as schools, houses of worship, cemeteries, and some businesses. For many years, StLGS was able to reproduce this atlas in book form for sale, but we have had to discontinue that option due to skyrocketing publication costs. The atlas was digitized many years ago and offered for sale by our society as a CD (and StLGS continues to sell those CDs in our secure online store.) However, never before has anyone been able to connect you directly to the page and location of everyone mentioned in the atlas . . . until now!

September Genealogy Meetings and Classes

And just that quickly, summer is almost over! As we look forward to pumpkin spice everything, shorter days, and, hopefully, cooler evenings, we are gearing up behind the scenes for next year. We will soon have an StLGS election for officers and will be booking our featured speaker for the 2025 Family History Conference, taking our annual research trip to Salt Lake City, and finalizing next year's busy program of meetings, special events, and classes. Meanwhile, here's what's on tap for September.

Orphans with Parents: Very Common in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Southside of Chicago, September 1897––Asleep in the street in a neighborhood teeming with saloons, gambling, and prostitution, a young boy named Andrew was “rescued” by one of the newly-minted social reformers on the southside and turned over to the juvenile court system. Although Andrew’s parents were alive and well, they were saloon keepers and not mindful of where their son was spending time; nor did they seem to have any clear plans for his education or future. Andrew was sent to a boys’ school, where he was deemed an orphan. Six months later, the now ten-year-old was handed over, via a train ride to rural South Dakota, to a Russian-German immigrant farmer and his family, with whom he spent the next decade and a half of his life. Andrew's story, and that of many others in our families was all too common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Read on for more information.

State Censuses Can Add to Your Research

Although our August monthly meeting, Understanding and Working with the U.S. Federal Census, presented by StLGS librarian, Judy Belford, concentrated on the federal census, taken every ten years, mention was also made of state censuses, and what they can add to our research. Many states conducted population censuses in "off years," that is years in which the federal census was not held. Although taken randomly and in odd years, state censuses can often serve as substitutes for some missing federal records, and, for the most part, they asked different questions than the federal censuses, so you might learn additional information on your ancestors.

First of Many Cemetery Maps Added to the StLGS Website AND StLGS Members: Please Vote on Amended Bylaws!

Although we have had data on many St. Louis-area cemeteries on our website for more than a decade, we have not had the ability to add maps to the pages until our resident map guru, Jim Bellenger, turned that task into his own pet project. For the past year, Jim has hunted down whatever maps exist for as many cemeteries as he could find and has used his talents to superimpose the old maps onto new Google maps and georeference them so that exact locations of even long-gone cemeteries are now visible. Jim has worked with dozens of people in St. Louis City and County and beyond to obtain the maps, get permission to use them, and link them in several ways to the cemetery pages on our site. Because this is so time-consuming, only the first batch of completed maps is now on the website, but lots more are coming!