Another Goodbye to a Friend, Some More Upcoming Events, and an Update to the Photo Scanning Day

In Memoriam: Jim Bresnahan, Former StLGS Webmaster

As many of you know, the StLGS website is one of our society’s most valuable assets. Developing and maintaining the site has taken thousands of volunteer hours and an incredible amount of expertise. We have been very lucky to have knowledgeable people design and create our website pages over the years, and this week we lost one of them. James “Jim” Bresnahan was our webmaster for almost twenty years, and it is with great sadness that we announce his passing on 26 January 2024 after a long illness.

Jim had a successful military career, serving in the U.S. Air Force and then the Missouri Air National Guard, reaching the rank of lieutenant colonel. He began volunteering as our webmaster in the early 2000s, creating pages and uploading data to the site, and he guided us through many upgrades and improvements during his extended tenure in that position. He nurtured those of us just learning, and his wonderfully weird sense of humor saw us through countless edits and errors along the way. (On a personal note, it’s because of Jim’s patience with this writer’s constant need to edit that I began to learn how to work on the site myself. I became “Your Favorite Pest” or “YFP” when we exchanged emails, and little by little, with the encouragement of Jim and the rest of the Tech Team, I learned the rudiments of website construction. I will always be grateful for his support and kindness.)

As a valued member of our Tech Team, StLGS recognized Jim for his efforts in 2010 with a Certificate of Achievement, in 2011 with a President’s Citation Award, in 2012 with an honorary life membership, and in 2016 with a Special Tech Team Award. 

(Members of the Tech Team in 2016; Jim is on the right. Photo by the late Ken Webb in the StLGS photo archives.)

Although we have been making much-needed changes to the website during the past few years, we have the solid foundation that Jim set for us to build on. He was responsible for designing and creating hundreds of pages and for successfully helping to move the site from one platform to another when we outgrew our first design.

We extend our deepest sympathy to Jim’s wife Annette and to his daughter Betsy and son Patrick and their families.

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Please Join us for our 2024 StLGS Open House!

Saturday, 23 March 2024

StLGS Office (4 Sunnen Drive, Suite 140, Maplewood, MO 63143)

10:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m.

Everyone is invited to stop by our office, learn more about our website, shop our book sales/Trading Post, meet SIG leaders, and discover volunteer opportunities. We'll have goodies to nibble on and lots of volunteers available to show you around and answer your questions. More information coming soon; watch the website, this blog, and our social media sites for all the details!

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Update on Our Photo Scanning Day, Sunday, 21 January 2024

Missouri State Archivist John Dougan, archivist Christina Miller, and their expert team of tech assistants spent the day with StLGS volunteers scanning historic photos of Missouri and gathering information about the people, places, and events depicted in those photos on Sunday, 21 January. During the day, we had twenty-three visitors who brought photos into our office resulting in 252 photographs and documents that were scanned, both fronts and backs where relevant. According to Visual Materials Archivist Erika Woehlk, our scanning event yielded eighty-two unique pages in the archives' Missouri Bicentennial Photograph Drive Collection area of the Missouri Digital Heritage website.

You can access this interesting new collection at

https://mdh.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16795coll35/search.

If you are looking for a specific contributor, you can click on a link at the left. You can also search the photos by category and location.

We thank everyone who participated in our event, but if you missed it and have photos you want to submit, you still have until the end of February to upload your photos and stories. Go to https://s1.sos.mo.gov/BicentennialPhotoDrive/Home/Submit for more information and to get started.