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 Honestly, neither did we until we started going through some past blog posts to begin the long process of discarding out-of-date information in preparation for some big changes coming to the StLGS website.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.

Honoring Our Deceased Military Ancestors for Memorial Day: National Cemeteries and Monuments

On this day of remembrance, we’d like to acquaint you with a government entity that you may not be aware of but which holds burial information on thousands of our military ancestors. The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC), located in Arlington, Virginia, “maintains twenty-six permanent American military cemeteries, thirty-one federal memorials, monuments, and markers in seventeen foreign countries.” A total of more than 200,000 deceased service members are honored at ABMC sites, and you can visit in person or search on the website to see what information may be available for your ancestors.

Second Batch of Cemetery Maps Now Uploaded to our Website!

In August of this year, we announced that our resident map guru, Jim Bellenger, has been using his talents to superimpose old cemetery 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 maps of the cemeteries, get permission to use them, and link them to the cemetery pages on our website. Because this is so time-consuming, we are releasing the maps in groups of about twenty to thirty, and now, we are happy to share the next batch of maps with you. (If you missed the post about the first set, you can read it here.)

A Thanksgiving Genealogy Gift and Another Farewell

StLGS bids farewell to another past-president with the passing on 26 October 2024 of Neil Fiala, who served in 2000–2001. Neil and his wife Barbara were active volunteers throughout the 1990s, and you can read more about them below. We also have a very special gift to all of you, courtesy of our intrepid "geospatial genealogist," Jim Bellenger, who has been working non-stop on creating maps for every cemetery on our website. This past week, we have finalized and uploaded about forty new maps, and the linked list below is a thank you for your generous donations to the society. Read on for all the details . . .

November/December Genealogy Meetings and a Reminder to Vote for StLGS Officers

Happy Halloween! We are coming to the end of another busy year of genealogy meetings, classes, and special events, and our StLGS volunteers have been hard at work planning next year's exciting calendar of events for you. Since the beautiful Clark Family Branch of the St. Louis County Library opened this summer, we have been welcomed by our friends in the Emerson History and Genealogy Center to a comfortable meeting room in the new building. Our November monthly meeting will be in our main floor meeting space but will also be livestreamed for those who can't attend in person. We have our last Jewish SIG meeting in early December, and one more class remains on the fall schedule. Also, StLGS members, Thursday, 31 October, is the last day to vote in our annual election of officers! More information about everything is below.

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!

Long-awaited Changes Come to Find a Grave!

Many of us use the website Find a Grave on a regular basis. Some of us have created memorial pages for our ancestors; some just mine the pages created by others. For those not familiar with the site, Find a Grave is a free website that is owned by Ancestry. It is crowdsourced, meaning the data on the site is submitted by volunteers who visit cemeteries for the purpose of photographing tombstones and adding biographical information on individuals and by others who may have direct connections to the people whose pages they maintain or visit.