Happy Fourteenth Anniversary to Our Blog!

Unless Sunday, June 7th is an important one for your family, you probably did not have the date marked on your calendar. Honestly, neither did we until we started going through some past blog posts to begin the long process of discarding out-of-date information in preparation for some big changes coming to the StLGS website. It was, therefore, a complete surprise to rediscover that the StLGS News Flash began its run on 7 June 2012, fourteen years from yesterday.

Our very first post was a mere two paragraphs, introducing the "new" way of communicating with our members and friends and making a brief announcement that the office would be closed for a special event that week. That first year, and for several years after, the blog was not weekly as it is now but appeared only when there was a bit of news to convey. It was just a paragraph or two and seldom had any visual interest, just text. It was an experiment for the society and for this inexperienced blogger. The intent was to phase out our newsletter, News 'n Notes, and let the blog take its place, which we did a few years later. It was sad to see the monthly newsletter go, but it was extremely time-consuming and expensive to produce.

There were several items of interest that we shared in 2012. We had a popular "Ask the Experts" Day, mourned the death of longtime volunteer, Ed Schmidt, and began what would be a short-lived Family Tree Maker research group. The 1940 census was released that year, and thanks to some amazing volunteer efforts locally and nationwide, it was indexed in record time.

That year, we also added three major databases to our website, which, if you haven't checked them out before, you may want to now. (Please keep in mind that some of our data is only available to StLGS members. If you are a member, be sure to log into the website first. If you aren't a member, we hope you will join us. Your dues enable us to keep digitizing, indexing, and growing our website.)

St. Louis Burials, Volume 3

Before we had the ability to place all of our cemetery data on our website, we produced several CDs containing information on St. Louis-area burials. In 2012, our then-webmaster, the late Jim Bresnahan, created pages for the twenty-one cemeteries—more than 330,000 burials—on our third cemetery CD. For the past few years, we have been updating those pages and others, editing and adding information where necessary. We now have maps of many of the cemeteries and much more data than we had fourteen years ago. You can start your exploration of our cemetery data on our "Cemeteries" page. Be sure you click on the link to the cemeteries list as well, or go directly to the list of cemeteries here.

St. John Nepomuk Messenger

Also in 2012, this Catholic Czech congregation, founded in 1854, shared with us a special edition of the parish magazine featuring the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Young Men's and Young Women's Sodality. We digitized the magazine and indexed it, and you can see what is available on the Saint John Nepomuk page.

Steamboats

In the Summer 2012 issue of the StLGS Quarterly, we published an article on steamboat-related occupations in St. Louis. However, we had much more information than we had paper pages, so we created some special pages on our website to accommodate the data. Here are the two lists we posted that year, which may help you find an ancestor.

1. Steamboat-Related Workers in the 1860 St. Louis Census
2. Steamboat Men on the Mississippi

What Next?

During the next few months, we expect some wonderful new changes to the StLGS website, so some of the above URLs may change. We will try to keep you updated as we make the changes, and we know you will be as excited to see them as we are to present them to you. Stay tuned!