A Preview of 2025 AND It's Giving Tuesday!

As this year begins to wind down, the StLGS Programs Committee has been hard at work getting all of our exciting events for 2025 in place. We are ready to open registration for the January meetings, we have a full-day Jewish genealogy seminar coming in early February, an Open House planned for March, and much more! We offer you a teaser of January events this week with much more to come as we get closer to the new year. And, this week brings us Giving Tuesday, which all non-profits, like St. Louis Genealogical Society, rely on for much-needed donations. Please read on for details.

A Thanksgiving Genealogy Gift and Another Farewell

StLGS bids farewell to another past-president with the passing on 26 October 2024 of Neil Fiala, who served in 2000–2001. Neil and his wife Barbara were active volunteers throughout the 1990s, and you can read more about them below. We also have a very special gift to all of you, courtesy of our intrepid "geospatial genealogist," Jim Bellenger, who has been working non-stop on creating maps for every cemetery on our website. This past week, we have finalized and uploaded about forty new maps, and the linked list below is a thank you for your generous donations to the society. Read on for all the details . . .

Officer Election Results, Exciting Website News, and Thank You to Our Supporters!

Thanks to all of you who voted in the election for our 2025–2026 officers. With unanimous votes, we will have co-presidents for the next two years as Kathy Franke and Jeani Ward share that position. Jim Yochim has been reelected as vice president for membership, and Debbie Benoit will take over as secretary beginning in January. We’d like to say a huge thank you to both Karen Goode and Cindy Finnegan, our current president and our society's secretary, who are ready to step down and hand the reins to our newly elected officers. Cindy has prepared board meeting notes, tackled dozens of thank you letters, scanned years' worth of old documents, and assisted at many of our events. As president for the past four years, Karen has managed to guide us successfully through one disaster after another. Her tenure began with a complete shutdown due to the pandemic, which led us to learning from scratch how to set up Zoom and hybrid meetings. After the office opened again, and we settled back into a more normal routine, it was time for a massive cleanup so we could get new carpet and a much-needed paint job. When all was finally sparkling clean and everything in place, we were faced with water damage due to a badly leaking roof, which shut us down for weeks again, and now, Karen is leading us through a complete redesign of our website. (More on that in just a bit.) Her leadership skills and her determination and perseverance in the face of one obstacle after another have kept our society on a steady course during some incredibly difficult times. We thank both Cindy and Karen for their hard work and look forward to seeing both of them enjoying some new adventures in the coming year.

And now for some exciting news about our StLGS website  . . .

Veterans Day and Genealogy

Happy Veterans Day! If you, your children, or other living family members have served in the military, we thank you so much for your service. If your parents, grandparents, or any other relatives in the past have served, this day commemorates them as well, and this holiday Monday, we are reminded of their commitment to our country and everything it stands for. Veterans Day, once called Armistice Day, is often confused with Memorial Day. The latter honors our fallen heroes, whereas Veterans Day was created as a way to say thank you and to honor living veterans. It is a fairly new holiday which began early in the twentieth century, when President Woodrow Wilson called on Americans to “remember the armistice,” signed on 11 November 1918, that ended World War I. His intention was to emphasize peace and to honor thousands of men who served in the war.

Voting in America—A Genealogical Perspective

With such an important election upon us, and with all of us who are of age and citizens of the U.S. entitled to vote, this seems to be an opportune time to look back at how our ancestors may have viewed elections. We know, of course, that many of our ancestors came from places where there were no national elections. Kings, queens, czars, and czarinas either inherited or took their positions without input from local citizens. When elections were held, they may have been symbolic only, and voting was often limited to certain groups of eligible men. Democracy was not something most of our ancestors knew in their homelands.

November/December Genealogy Meetings and a Reminder to Vote for StLGS Officers

Happy Halloween! We are coming to the end of another busy year of genealogy meetings, classes, and special events, and our StLGS volunteers have been hard at work planning next year's exciting calendar of events for you. Since the beautiful Clark Family Branch of the St. Louis County Library opened this summer, we have been welcomed by our friends in the Emerson History and Genealogy Center to a comfortable meeting room in the new building. Our November monthly meeting will be in our main floor meeting space but will also be livestreamed for those who can't attend in person. We have our last Jewish SIG meeting in early December, and one more class remains on the fall schedule. Also, StLGS members, Thursday, 31 October, is the last day to vote in our annual election of officers! More information about everything is below.

Sharing the Results of the Genealogical Hunt!

We love tracking down our ancestors through online databases, in courthouses, and at county clerks’ offices and can easily spend hours and hours in the pursuit. In the process we uncover the details of our forebears’ lives—birth and death dates that tie them to a place, marriage records that tell us who some of their closest friends or family were, and census records that show us the makeup of their families. Digging a little deeper, we can also discover fascinating details about their occupations, their brushes with the law, whether they left their homeland to start over in a new location, and much more. DNA has taken genealogical research to a whole new level and provides another tool to break through those brick walls we all seem to have. We learn so much as we are pursuing our ancestors, it's wonderful to pay it forward to others. Jane Theissen, our StLGS Quarterly editor, hopes to inspire you to take the plunge into writing for our journal. Jane writes . . .