The Perfect Genealogy Vacation: A Week in Salt Lake City!

Each year in the fall, St. Louis Genealogical Society sponsors a week-long immersive research trip to the world's largest genealogy repository—the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. This year's adventure, our thirty-third trip, runs from Sunday, 11 October through Sunday, 18 October 2026, and registration is now open. For one full week, you can enjoy non-stop research time in this huge genealogy playground! Read on for all the details.

Ready to Learn More About Artificial Intelligence? Join us in September . . .

Exploring AI for Genealogy: A Hands-On Experience

Featuring StLGS co-webmaster, Jim Ross

Genealogical Timelines Can Be Wonderful Research Tools!

Now that summer is in full "Hot" mode, many of us are spending these sunny, sticky days indoors where the air conditioning can be a lifesaver. If you are one of those folks, perhaps it means you are also refocusing on your genealogy and looking for ways to solve baffling problems. One overlooked tool that may help you is a timeline. Let's look at what timelines are and how they might solve genealogical mysteries.

StLGS July Genealogy Meetings

Happy Almost Fourth of July! We hope you have a safe and enjoyable holiday! After you put away your barbecue supplies and polish off the last of the leftovers, be sure to pull out your calendar and make note of our upcoming genealogy meetings, all indoors and air conditioned! Please don't forget that the deadline for early registration for our Salt Lake City Research Trip is today! And remember that the deadline for watching the digital recordings of the Family History Conference is Sunday, 3 August. You can still register to see them. All the information you need is below. . . . 

Join us in Salt Lake City for a Week at the FamilySearch Library!

Registration for the St. Louis Genealogical Society's annual genealogy research trip to the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, Utah, is now open. This year's adventure runs from Sunday, 5 October through Sunday, 12 October 2025. This is our thirty-second annual trip to the world's largest genealogical library. For one full week, you can enjoy non-stop, immersive working time in this huge genealogy playground! Read on for all the details.

Ready to Visit the FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City? Come With Us This Fall!

If you attended (or plan to watch the recordings of) this year's Family History Conference, you were lucky enough to hear FamilySearch's Chief Genealogical Officer, David Rencher, talk about the exciting changes the library has undergone in the past few years. Perhaps you didn't realize that the FamilySearch library in Salt Lake City has so much to offer: five floors of books, computers, microfilms, maps, and more. Or maybe you didn't know that St. Louis Genealogical Society leads a group tour there every autumn, and it's time to register for this year's trip! Here are all the details . . .

Put Meat on the Bones of Your Family History!

You have undoubtedly heard many genealogists talking about “putting the meat on the bones” when it comes to their family history. Just how do you do that and what does it mean? We learn when we start working on our genealogy that it’s vital to capture names, dates, and places for everyone in our family tree. Of course, it is absolutely necessary to find documentation of basic facts and we need specific information to do that. But if we want to understand our ancestors as living, breathing human beings instead of just statistics, we need to know much more. We want to learn about their personalities, their occupations, their leisure activities, and their interactions in their communities. The more “meat” we put on those bare-bones dates and numbers, the more those people who preceded us become real.

How to Find an Old Post and Other Social Media Search Tips

Have you ever seen a post in a Facebook group, then later couldn't find it when you went back to look for it? Social media can move fast these days, and as we have all been at our computers and using social media more and more, it's important we sharpen our search skills so we can more easily find what we want. For instance, you can search most blogs, including this one, for names, topics, places, and more. Similarly, you can search for people, surnames, and places (and more) in the St. Louis Genealogical Society's Facebook group. You can also quickly locate genealogy-specific accounts and tweets on Twitter. Here is how you can search smarter when you are using social media.