September Genealogy Meetings, Upcoming Classes, and Fall Speaker Series

It feels like the summer has flown by, doesn't it? But fall is almost here, and we are excited about our remaining meetings, some new upcoming classes, and our hybrid Fall Speaker Series. All the details to get you started with our fall event schedule are below.

St. Louis Through the Ages: Exploring the City of Your Ancestors

Many of us have deep roots in St. Louis. Even if you don’t have ancestors who lived here, if you have lived in St. Louis for a good part of your life, you likely feel very close to the city’s history. For those reasons, we invite you to attend “St. Louis Through the Ages: Exploring the City of Your Ancestors,” our annual Fall Speaker Series, featuring Emily Jaycox and Dennis Northcott from the Missouri History Museum’s Library and Research Center. Emily and Dennis will present four lectures on Saturday, 16 September 2023, from 9:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. (Central) at the StLGS office, 4 Sunnen Drive, Suite 140, Maplewood, MO 63143.

StLGS August Meetings AND Registration for the Fall Speaker Series Opens!

We usually refer to the hot, humid, days of August as the "dog days of summer." But that doesn't mean you should be deprived of exciting genealogy events! Join us for these upcoming August meetings that should allow you to stay cool and learn at the same time! And registration is now open for our exciting hybrid Fall Speaker Series. Read on for all the details . . .

November/December StLGS Genealogy Meetings

Happy Halloween! As the year winds down, don't forget St. Louis Genealogical Society still has a few meetings for you to attend, either in person or virtually, via Zoom. And while we are enjoying our Halloween treats, we are also hard at work planning next year's exciting calendar of events. Our November monthly meeting will again be at the Thornhill branch of St. Louis County Library, but will also be livestreamed for those who can't attend in person. We have our last Jewish SIG meeting in early December, and, in case you missed the Fall Speaker Series, the good news is you can still attend virtually! The recordings remain available until the end of the year, and you can register on our website. Also, StLGS members, today is the last day to vote in our annual election of officers! More information about everything is below.

October StLGS Genealogy Meetings and Events

Before we get to genealogy, all of us at StLGS want to send our best wishes to our friends in Florida and the Carolinas, with hopes that you, your loved ones, and your homes are safe in the aftermath of Hurricane Ian. Our hearts are with those of you living in areas where there was destruction; please know that we are thinking of you.

Now that fall has arrived, if you still haven't ventured back out to work on your genealogy, why not plan to attend a monthly meeting? Our October monthly meeting will again be at the Thornhill branch of St. Louis County Library, but will also be livestreamed for those who can't attend in person. We have an Irish SIG meeting in October, and, in case you missed the Fall Speaker Series, the good news is you can still attend virtually! The recordings are now available, and you can register on our website. Also, StLGS members, it's time to vote in our annual election of officers! More information about everything is below.

Finding American Ancestors Before 1840

What would we genealogists do without the U.S. federal census? We have come to rely on it for so much: names, ages, occupations, locations, neighbors, and, in some years, military and citizenship information, health status, individual wealth, and more. But . . .  all that bonus information only applies to the censuses from 1850 onwards. What about our ancestors who lived in earlier years? The earliest censuses captured only basic information, so how do we find out more about the lives of our pre-1850 ancestors?  There are genealogical methods you can use to learn more, and noted genealogist, D. Joshua Taylor, will go into depth on this in his presentation, "Bridging the Gap: Finding Ancestors in the United States Between 1790 and 1840," at our annual Fall Speaker Series this coming Saturday, 1 October 2022. Read on to learn the details!

Ancestors with No Children: Why You Need to Research Them!

One of the basic guidelines of doing thorough genealogical research is to always work on collateral family lines. That simply means we should not just attempt to go back in a straight line from child to parent to grandparent, etc., but to remember that all our ancestors were part of families, and every sibling is important to our research, whether they had children of their own or not. In fact, sometimes the childless members of our families provide us with the exact information we need to break down our stubborn brick walls. This is one of the four topics our guest speaker, D. Joshua Taylor, will present at the StLGS Fall Speaker Series, Saturday, 1 October 2022, and we have stories from our own genealogical research to share.

September StLGS Meetings and Events

Our August monthly meeting on researching the history of your house was the first time for us at the Grant's View branch of the St. Louis County Library, and we were so pleased to see some familiar as well as some new faces for the in-person meeting and to greet many more who attended via Zoom. Our September schedule includes a monthly meeting at the Thornhill branch of the library, a German Special Interest Meeting at the Oak Bend branch, and a hybrid class, for StLGS members, at our office in Maplewood. We are also very excited to be hosting nationally known genealogist, D. Joshua Taylor, for our Fall Speaker Series on Saturday, 1 October. Early registration ends on 17 September, so be sure to register soon! More details coming up . . .

StLGS August Meetings and More!

Most of us are sweltering this summer, but doesn't that make the idea of attending a genealogy meeting in a cool, air-conditioned location that much more appealing?  Now that the St. Louis County Library Headquarters building is closed, we have been working with our friends at the library to reserve large, comfortable meeting locations at several of the branch libraries for the remaining months of this year and all of 2023. Because our membership is so widespread, we have decided to use several venues throughout St. Louis County plus our office for our hybrid meetings, so we can accommodate everyone, regardless of where you live. You will not have to reserve space if you are attending in person, but do pay attention to meeting locations from now on. We will have Google map links to each branch library on our website as meetings open for registration. We have several interesting meetings coming up in August that should fill the bill for staying cool and learning at the same time, so check these out!

July StLGS Meetings, Events, and More!

Happy Fourth of July! We hope you have had a good holiday weekend, have stayed cool and dry, and celebrated the birth of our country safely and happily. Now that the holiday is over and summer is in full swing, we also hope you will make some time for attending some upcoming genealogy meetings. Our monthly meeting will be hybrid; you can attend in person at our office or via Zoom. However, the Irish Special Interest Group meeting this month will be via Zoom only. We are also announcing the Fall Speaker Series, now open for registration, and a new membership category for young people. Read on for more!

November Genealogy Events and News

Finally, it feels like fall! Halloween is behind us, Thanksgiving is just a few weeks away, and Chanukah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa will be here before we know it. Our genealogy year is winding down, but we have an interesting monthly meeting planned for November, and, if you missed the livestreaming of our Fall Speaker Series, "Mapping Our Ancestors," you can still register to watch the digital recordings. Our friends in St. Clair County, Illinois, have an upcoming meeting that may be helpful to you, and we want to share an honor recently bestowed on a historic African American cemetery in St. Louis County. Read on for all the details.

StLGS October/November Upcoming Genealogy Events

As 2021 rolls into its last few months, we encourage you to continue to stay in touch with us and to take advantage of the remaining programs we have scheduled for the fall. Register for the Fall Speaker Series, featuring a full day of lectures on "Mapping Our Ancestors" in America, enjoy the last Irish SIG meeting of the year, and join us for the November monthly meeting. Behind the scenes, the StLGS programs committee is working hard and almost ready to announce our exciting schedule for 2022. Read on for what's coming up and watch for announcements about next year! 

Mapping Rural and Urban Ancestors

As we bring our series of posts on prominent maps and mapping websites to a close, we want to mention two more important resources for genealogists. The first is a subscription website that may help you as you begin to collect more information on the locations in which your ancestors settled, especially if they were first landowners. Historygeo.com is a website that specializes in linking first landowners to maps so that you don’t have to do the plotting and linking yourself. It contains information on more than twelve million landowners in the thirty public land states, all linked to an interactive map, and, when you subscribe, you can personalize lists and add markers, migration routes, and other details of interest to you.

The site also contains a large collection of antique maps. You can browse the collection of all of the United States and some foreign countries, or you can search for exactly what you are looking for. 

The search function of the website is free and you may want to plug in some of your names to see if they show up. You will get a list of states and then, if you click a link, a list of counties where the names appear. The website also contains two lengthy tutorials (YouTube recordings) that you may want to watch to see if the collections are of relevance to you. There is currently no free trial, but you can subscribe for three months for $20, making it fairly easy to try the site out. In addition, some libraries, like St. Louis County Library, offer free access, so you should check with your local library.

As American cities grew in a rather topsy-turvy fashion during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fires became more of a hazard, and many building owners relied on fire insurance to save them from financial disaster. Fire insurance companies needed detailed maps of the areas they were protecting so they knew how to assign payments. For many years, the insurance companies sent people to inspect every property and to assess its risk for fire, but with the rapid growth in cities, that became impractical. The need for a better system inspired Daniel Alfred Sanborn to create the Sanborn Map Company in 1866 and within fifty years, it became the largest of the companies producing fire insurance maps.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Saint Louis, Independent City, Missouri. Sanborn Map Company, Jul, 1907. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn04858_003/.

What is special about these maps is their incredible detail of urban areas throughout the United States. The maps were produced in full color and included all outbuildings, homes, businesses, and public building, all done to scale. If you are researching urban ancestors between 1866 and the mid-twentieth century, the Sanborn maps will provide you with a captivating look at the neighborhoods in which they lived. You can see the places where they shopped, worshipped, went to school, and enjoyed a bit of recreation, all in relation to their homes.

“HistoryGeo.com and Sanborn Maps: Rural and Urban Map Research” in the StLGS Fall Speaker Series

Sanborn maps are widely available online and StLGS Systems Director, Bob Goode, will explain how you can access them as well as how you can make the most of the HistoryGeo.com website in the last of the four lectures in the StLGS Fall Speaker Series, “Mapping Our Ancestors,” which will take place live via Zoom on Saturday, 16 October 2021. Bob will help you discover how these two resources can enhance your knowledge of your ancestors.

Three additional presentations round out our Speaker Series on maps: an introduction to the earliest American migration trails, an overview of federal land records, plat maps, and plat books, and a detailed look at the map collections on the Library of Congress website. The Fall Speaker Series is coming soon, and you won't want to miss it. You can register for this exciting day of lectures now on the StLGS website!

Mining the Maps in the Library of Congress

Genealogists love libraries! And our country’s biggest, best library is the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. This incredible national treasure acquires and catalogs our nation’s publications, administers the nation’s copyright program, and organizes and preserves archival material. It maintains a massive website to help researchers access its collections as well as a beautiful building where researchers can work if they are in the nation’s capital.

Migrating Westward: Federal Land

Many of our ancestors depended on the land for their livelihoods. Land provided food, shelter, and wealth. In the early days of the United States, land was used as payment for military service and as an inducement for westward migration. The land seemed limitless, and its resources lured settlers, explorers, and speculators ever onward through hazards and hardship.

Traveling in the U.S. via the Rivers

Migration has been part of this country’s history since its inception, and for the next few weeks, we will explore some ways you can learn more about your ancestors’ travels across North America, wherever and however they went. 

Perhaps you had ancestors who used the rivers to travel or to earn a living? If so, you will want to know about the Waterways Journal, 134 years old and “America’s oldest continuously published inland waterways trade magazine.” The Herman T. Pott National Inland Waterways Library, located in the Mercantile Library on the campus of the University of Missouri-St. Louis, has an extensive collection of these journals and related materials and has recently added even more. The publisher of the Waterways Journal has donated its research library and photo morgue to the library.

StLGS November/December Genealogy Meetings

  

We hope everyone had a safe and healthy Halloween, even if it wasn't exactly the same as years past. It looks like November will be off to a sunny, mild start in our part of the Midwest, and, as we begin the countdown to the holiday season, which also will look and feel quite different this year, we want to remind you that our genealogy calendar still contains several exciting virtual events. We have one more class online, free to StLGS members, as well as an interesting monthly meeting, open to all, a Jewish SIG meeting, and our virtual Fall Speaker Series, "Often Overlooked St. Louis Resources," which is now available online as digital recordings. Here are all the details.

10 Genealogy Webinars Now Available on StLGS Website—Many for Free!

As this very strange year begins to draw into its waning days, and with all the coming and going of Zoom meetings and digital recordings, this is a good time to remind everyone of the growing collection of recorded classes, meetings, and webinars that are now available on our website. Although our online classes are only for members, meetings that have been digitally recorded are open to everyone, and it’s still not too late to take advantage of the virtual Fall Speaker Series, "Often Overlooked St. Louis Resources," with livestreamed lectures scheduled for next weekend, October 17th and 18th. Here is what is currently available on our website and how to access everything that is there. Be aware that there are expiration dates on some of the recordings, so don’t miss your chance to watch!

Looking for Hard-to-Find Genealogy Records in St. Louis?

So many of us have ancestors who wound up in orphanage care or migrated, at least in part, via the railroads. We all have searched cemeteries, and perhaps many of us have attempted to find obscure records in library collections. What if we could spend several hours taught by local experts in the safety and comfort of our homes, learning more about what genealogy records might be available? Wouldn't that be just perfect? Well, the opportunity is here! 

October StLGS Genealogy Meetings and Events

 

Happy autumn! In spite of all of the ups and downs of the summer, doesn't it seem to have gone by quickly? As cooler weather begins to set in and leaves start to fall, we hope you will snuggle up in front of your computer and join us for several fun and stimulating virtual genealogy events. We have classes online, free to StLGS members, as well as an exciting monthly meeting, open to all, and, of course, our virtual Fall Speaker Series, "Often Overlooked St. Louis Resources," coming up the weekend of October 17 and 18. Read on for all the details.