The official blog of the St. Louis Genealogical Society. Be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter! Send news to publications@stlgs.org .
Happy Labor Day! It's unofficially the end of summer, but we still have plans for weeks of pleasant weather ahead, just right for getting out and attending some genealogy meetings. So, we hope to see you in September for our monthly meeting, our German SIG meeting, and our special workshop on artificial intelligence at the end of the month. Read on for all the details.
Happy Almost Fourth of July! We hope you have a safe and enjoyable holiday! After you put away your barbecue supplies and polish off the last of the leftovers, be sure to pull out your calendar and make note of our upcoming genealogy meetings, all indoors and air conditioned! Please don't forget that the deadline for early registration for our Salt Lake City Research Trip is today! And remember that the deadline for watching the digital recordings of the Family History Conference is Sunday, 3 August. You can still register to see them. All the information you need is below. . . .
Our annual Family History Conference on Saturday, 3 May 2025, was a huge success, thanks to dozens of hard-working volunteers and more than one hundred curious participants, both in-person and online. For the first time since the pandemic, we had an almost-capacity live audience, and our three dynamic speakers captivated everyone with the endless possibilities that artificial intelligence and DNA analysis bring to genealogy. If you couldn't attend on Saturday, we have a treat for you—all the lectures were recorded, and they will be available for viewing for the next three months. Here's how you can access them . . .
Just a friendly reminder that the deadline to save money with early registration to our annual Family History Conference is this week—Thursday, 17 April 2025. You won't want to miss "Artificial Intelligence (AI) and DNA: Tools for Unlocking Your Past," featuring Steve Little, Jim Brewster, and Josiah Schmidt! It's a full day to learn more about the newest topics in genealogy. Details and registration are on the Family History Conference page on our website. We also want to remind you that registration for our Research Trip to the FamilySearch library in Salt Lake City is now open. This is a wonderful way to spend a week in October with fellow researchers at the world's largest genealogy library. All the information you need to learn about the trip and register is on our Annual Research Trip page, and we'll have more for you in a future post, so stay tuned! Now, we'd like to share some important information from some of our local St. Louis repositories.
For decades, those of us researching our family history have watched technology change the way we work. If you started your journey towards the end of the twentieth century, you expected to travel to a library or courthouse, sit among books, periodicals, and boxes of old papers, and read unindexed material for hours. If you were fortunate, some of what you needed was microfilmed, and you could crank faded and blurry images until your shoulders ached and your hands cramped. The first of many updates in genealogy came to microfilm readers when they became more automatic. Film could be threaded, advanced, or reversed with just a touch of a button. But, lucky for us, technology forged onwards, and our lives became a whole lot easier.
Our Open House on Saturday, 22 March, was a great success, and now we have more exciting events and meetings for you to attend, either in-person or via Zoom, coming up soon. Registration is open for our 53rd annual Family History Conference featuring Steve Little, Jim Brewster, and Josiah Schmidt. Remember that early registration ends on 17 April! By registering before that date, you save some money and help us plan more efficiently. In addition, one of the events we look forward to most each year is our annual research trip to Salt Lake City, and registration is now open for that. Read on for more!
We've had a little taste of spring in St. Louis this week, and we are looking forward to our March meetings and events. If you missed the February meeting on "Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Genealogy," featuring our co-webmaster Jim Ross, you can still watch the digital recording on our Monthly Meeting page and get some great ideas for how you can incorporate this new technology in your own family history research. You can dive deeper into AI at our upcoming Family History Conference! Later this month, the German SIG has a meeting, and we are excited to welcome you to our annual Open House on Saturday, March 22nd. Read on for more information.
Our genealogical year got off to a great start with several very well-attended meetings. Our January "Ask Louie at Your Service" meeting, as always, generated a host of interesting questions, and we've added a handout covering the websites mentioned during the meeting to our Monthly Meeting page along with the digital recording of the meeting. The Irish Special Interest Group (SIG) hosted a Zoom presentation featuring the noted author, John Grenham. The recording of the meeting and Mr. Grenham's handout are posted on our Irish SIG page. The German and Jewish SIGs also met this past month, but neither meeting was recorded. We hope to see you at our February monthly meeting and our first class for 2025. Read on for details.
