Why Not Honor a St. Louisan for the Holidays?

 StLGS’s St. Louis City/County Biographies Project

A few years ago, StLGS began a project that has become an integral part of our website. Initially conceived to help celebrate the 200th birthday of Missouri, the St. Louis City/County Biographies Project now hosts almost 270 biographies of St. Louisans of all descriptions. To encourage more people to write and to keep the biographies a fairly reasonable length, we set a limit of 500 words and will accept one or two copyright-free photographs to accompany each biography. 

Gingerbread History for the Holidays

We thought this week, as we approach Christmas weekend, we’d share some fun facts about one of our beloved holiday foods, gingerbread. Perhaps you baked and decorated some gingerbread men or built a house with some of the young people in your family to celebrate the holiday. Many of us now just use kits or mixes for our gingerbread, but what we create really bears little resemblance to the gingerbread our ancestors knew.

Gingerbread was popular throughout Europe for centuries. Ginger root came from China, where it was used for its medicinal properties, especially for indigestion. A form of gingerbread appeared in both Greek and Egyptian early history. As trade increased between East and West, ginger was more available, and by the Middle Ages, its strong flavor was used to disguise the taste of meat that might not have been very fresh. (Image from Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

We Owe You So Many Thanks! AND Schnucks eScrip News

March 2022 will make two years since we had to shut our doors to visitors due to the COVID pandemic. We definitely thought that by now we would be back to “normal,” but, like everyone else, we are dealing with the reality of “new normal.” Throughout the past two years, we have strived to keep going in the best ways possible given that so many of our office volunteers are seniors dealing with chronic health conditions. We are rolling with the ups and downs of not knowing where and when we will have in-person meetings and how best to conduct them. We have mastered Zoom and are now in the process of learning how to do hybrid meetings so that we will be ready to invite you back to our office as soon as it is safe. (If you aren't sure what we mean by hybrid, be sure to take a look at our blog from 26 July 2021 on Zoom webinars.)

Lost and Found Photos on the StLGS Website

Genealogists’ hearts ache when we see old photos discarded at estate sales, antique stores, or flea markets. We lament the unidentified photos in our own relatives’ albums and long to reunite photos we find far away from home with the families that lost them. Alas, that is not always easy.

Finding a family of origin of a photo with no identification is truly the old needle in a haystack cliché. We very often have people send photos to St. Louis Genealogical Society with nothing more than the name of a photographer and his address on the back, but there is little to no chance of ever discovering the subject's identity. There are people who collect photos from certain photographers, so that’s always a possibility, but ascertaining a family or descendants is virtually impossible, as there is no way to search for an unnamed person on a photo.