More Cemetery Maps Now on our Website!

For the past year, our resident map guru, Jim Bellenger, has been working tirelessly to find lost St. Louis City and County cemeteries, acquire maps of existing cemeteries, and use Google maps to locate and georeference as many of these sites as he can. He finished his first set of maps in August 2024 and his second set in January of this year. This has been an extremely time-consuming project for Jim and his resident StLGS editor, but we are delighted that he is finished (for now) and we can share the last batch of maps with you today. If you missed the post about the first set of cemetery maps, you can read it here. The post announcing the second set is here.

Updated Congregations Maps Added to the StLGS Website!

Suppose you had a female ancestor who lived in St. Louis in the 1860s, but you couldn’t discover her birth date. There are no statewide birth records in Missouri prior to 1910, and, although the City of St. Louis kept a birth register, compliance was not compulsory; hence, it is incomplete. Religious records would be very helpful, as births, baptisms, confirmations, and other life events were usually recorded by religious leaders and kept on site. You know where your ancestor lived and what religion her family practiced, but how do you know what congregations were active at the time she was born? A new set of congregations maps is now live on our website, and an exciting feature of the maps is the ability to see exactly which churches and synagogues were open in the city and county at any given time. Let’s take a look!

New on the StLGS Website . . .

It’s been a while since we have brought you updates from the StLGS website, https://stlgs.org, so this week, we will catch you up. During the past few months, our volunteers have been working hard to add new data to our congregations project, upload new biographies, update and correct cemetery data, and add new information from donated memorabilia.

StLGS Congregations Index Pages Now Include Maps to Locate Churches and Synagogues

More maps for our website! Yes, we have spent a lot of time and energy recently on maps, but they are so incredibly valuable for genealogists, that we feel it’s worth devoting more than the usual amount of attention to them. During this past week, our map guru/technology volunteer, Jim Bellenger, uploaded a whole series of locator maps for all of our congregation indexes! That’s right––now you can click on a link and go to an exact location for every church and synagogue for which we have an address in our indexes.