Another Victory for Reclaim the Records!

We want to thank one of our readers, Bob Meinhardt, for reminding us about the newest accomplishment of the exciting, hardworking genealogy group, Reclaim the Records. The last time we wrote about this amazing organization was in February 2020, when we introduced you to them and what they were doing on behalf of all genealogists throughout the U.S. to make public records truly public. (You can read that previous post here.)

Funeral Rituals and Traditions: Part II

In our last post, we talked about the importance of understanding some of the rituals and traditions surrounding funerals. We looked at coffins, caskets, and common practices that many associate with burying our loved ones. This week, we'll explore floriography, the symbolic meaning of plants and trees, so we can better understand some of what we see at funerals and cemeteries.

StLGS Congregations Project News and Farewell to Another Volunteer

(Thanks to Carol Whitton, StLGS Projects Director, for contributing the first part of this week's post.)

As you may know, St. Louis Genealogical Society (StLGS) is currently working on a project to identify, index, digitize, and preserve all St. Louis City and County congregational records. We hope all congregations will choose to participate and allow StLGS to put indexes and images of their historical records on our website. Records we are scanning, digitizing, and indexing include baptisms, confirmations, marriages, deaths, and, in some cases, member lists. During the past ten years, we’ve identified about 1,700 congregations, both historical and existing, in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County. To date, we’ve completed only a tiny fraction, 112 congregations, with more than thirty more underway. Our goal is to help preserve as many records as we can and make them more readily available to family historians. To do this, however, we need more congregations to share their records, and for that, we need your help!