St. Louis Hospitals on the StLGS Website

Medical records in almost every state are private, and it is often frustrating knowing that an ancestor may have been in a hospital but not why or where. Unfortunately, we can't solve the "why" problem for you, but if you had an ancestor hospitalized in St. Louis City or County, we have made inroads on the "where." We have long had a page on our website for St. Louis-area hospitals with a link to a list of known hospitals. On that page, you can also find a link to information about the cholera epidemic of 1849 and links to two repositories that have microfilmed registers from the old St. Louis City Hospital for a limited number of years. We are pleased to announce that our hospital list now has been greatly enhanced by webmaster Jim Bellenger, who has also used his map magic skills on a newly designed Google Maps interface, so you can see where each hospital was (or still is).

September Genealogy Meetings and Classes

And just that quickly, summer is almost over! As we look forward to pumpkin spice everything, shorter days, and, hopefully, cooler evenings, we are gearing up behind the scenes for next year. We will soon have an StLGS election for officers and will be booking our featured speaker for the 2025 Family History Conference, taking our annual research trip to Salt Lake City, and finalizing next year's busy program of meetings, special events, and classes. Meanwhile, here's what's on tap for September.

First of Many Cemetery Maps Added to the StLGS Website AND StLGS Members: Please Vote on Amended Bylaws!

Although we have had data on many St. Louis-area cemeteries on our website for more than a decade, we have not had the ability to add maps to the pages until our resident map guru, Jim Bellenger, turned that task into his own pet project. For the past year, Jim has hunted down whatever maps exist for as many cemeteries as he could find and has used his talents to superimpose the old maps onto new Google maps and georeference them so that exact locations of even long-gone cemeteries are now visible. Jim has worked with dozens of people in St. Louis City and County and beyond to obtain the maps, get permission to use them, and link them in several ways to the cemetery pages on our site. Because this is so time-consuming, only the first batch of completed maps is now on the website, but lots more are coming!

StLGS Proposes Bylaws Changes

St. Louis Genealogical Society operates according to a set of bylaws that are drawn up by the board of directors and approved by the society’s members. The bylaws are periodically reviewed by committee and, if necessary, the committee proposes revisions. The bylaws that are currently in place were last revised in 2014. Late this summer, a bylaws committee met and submitted a set of proposed changes to the board of directors. The StLGS board of directors has agreed to these changes and now offers them to members for approval.

The original wording and the proposed changes are below. (You can read the complete bylaws on the StLGS website by clicking here.)