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. 

Anyone can be a subject of a biography as long as they are deceased. They do not have to be an ancestor, nor do you have to be an StLGS member to send us bios. The pages on our website are open to everyone. The project has been endorsed by Missouri 2021, an initiative of the State Historical Society of Missouri and carries the bicentennial logo.

A page of instructions on the StLGS website will help you get started. Each of the names that appears in the bios is indexed, so you can quickly determine if you already have a family member who appears in a bio. There is also a master index of the subjects of all the bios so you can see if a bio has already been written about someone you are interested in.

We never publish contact information for our authors, but if you want to correspond with someone who has written a biography, we will help you to get in touch with that person. It has been very rewarding to see people discover family members because a biography has been posted on our website!

Who is important enough to appear in a biography?

Anyone! We have biographies on early St. Louis settlers, hard-working immigrants, successful people in business, and skilled hobbyists. We especially encourage people to submit biographies on ordinary St. Louisans, and we would really like to see more women and minorities represented in our collection.

Ready to get started?

With the holiday season comes family reunions, and this is a great time to interview your older relatives or to spend time reminiscing about your own parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. For tips on interviewing family members, you might want to review our blog from 18 December 2017.

If you have any questions about submitting biographies, please don’t hesitate to send an email to bios@stlgs.org. We eagerly look forward to your submissions!

Coming Up . . .

Next week, we'll have the January 2022 schedule for you, but if you can't wait, check out the Calendar of Events page on our website.