St. Louis Genealogical Society February Meetings and Classes

Our new year of genealogy meetings and classes is off and running. If you weren't able to join us on Zoom for our January panel discussion of "Ask Louie" questions and answers, you can still watch the recording that is posted on our website on the Monthly Meetings page. Our panel of genealogy professionals answered a number of questions that may help you with your own research. Our February monthly meeting, also on Zoom, will focus on an important record set—probate records—so you won't want to miss it!

Marriage Bonds: How to Use Them to Build Family Relationships

Most genealogists are quite familiar with marriage licenses. Depending on where you live, they may or may not contain quite a bit of information. However, if your ancestors resided in the south or some mid-Atlantic states throughout the nineteenth century, you have another record set to examine that may help you to link families when marriage licenses are limited. These are marriage bonds, and we’ll take a look this week at what they are and why they may be useful to you in your research.

Policeman's Diary Reveals a Slice of Late 19th-Century Life in St. Louis

Charles Henry Richter was a police officer in the Sixth District of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department in the mid-1890s. We know this about him because he kept a diary from September 1893 until August 1896 that was preserved and cared for by the residents of Breeze Park Lutheran Senior Services in St. Charles, Missouri. The story of the diary and how it came to St. Louis Genealogical Society is the subject of an article in the fall 2021 St. Louis Genealogical Society Quarterly, recently published by the society. The contents of Officer Richter's diary have been digitized, indexed, and posted on our website. Read on to learn more. . . .

Learn More About Symbols on Tombstones

Are you familiar with the term "iconography"? Pronounced "eye-con-og-ra-fee," it means, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, "symbolic representation, especially the conventional meanings attached to an image or images." Even if you've never heard of the word, as a genealogist, you know how important it is to understand the meaning of what we see on tombstones. Among many other things, we may learn whether an ancestor was in a fraternal order, what his/her occupation may have been, or if he/she had life cut short too soon.

January 2022 StLGS Genealogy Meetings and Another Farewell

We are excited to begin another year of interesting genealogy programs. While we did hope that we would be able to resume meeting in person, for now, we will continue meeting with you via Zoom. We had also planned to start hybrid meetings in February with our first 2022 class, but with the current COVID situation, that class will likely come to you online too. As much as we would like to have some attendees in person at our office and others joining us on their computers, this may just have to wait. If nothing else, these past two years have taught us to be flexible! We hope you had a happy holiday season, and you are ready for a busy year of genealogy. Here's a start for the new year!