Why Should Genealogical Societies Have Facebook Pages?

If you read my earlier post, you'll know that Eastern Washington Genealogical Society recently added a Facebook page. You may be wondering, "Why should EWGS--or any society for that matter--have a Facebook page?"

Facebook is one of the fastest growing social media websites on the Internet. By social media, we mean a way that people connect with one another. It is a free way of getting EWGS publicized to our community and to the world. Suppose you lived in another part of the country and had ancestors that lived in Eastern Washington? By doing a search on Facebook, you could connect with EWGS and find out about our society. Others who are merely curious will find a Brief History of EWGS (written by Bette Topp) and our society objectives listed on the Facebook page. I'll bet that in the past, only EWGS members knew our history and objectives. Now everyone on Facebook can know and discover what an amazing society EWGS is! There are links to our site and to this blog as well, and soon we'll have photos up of our Walking with the Ancestors cemetery tour from July.

Since you now know about EWGS having a page on Facebook, you might discover a society Facebook page in one of your ancestral locations as well! I searched for "genealogical society" in Facebook's search engine and came up with 396 societies besides our own. I also searched for "genealogy society" and came up with 19 results. When I searched for "historical society," it yielded over 500 pages!

Many people are becoming interested in genealogy, especially with television shows such as PBS's "Faces of America," NBC's "Who Do You Think You Are?" and BYU-TV's "The Generations Project." We know that senior citizens are probably the age group with the most interest in genealogy (although younger age groups are also very interested!). Did you know that the senior citizens group is also the fastest-growing age group on Facebook? So--all those seniors, getting on Facebook to connect with their grandkids and old classmates and military buddies--they now can also connect with genealogy societies around the world through Facebook pages! It's a win-win situation!

Be sure to "Like" EWGS's Facebook page here or click on the link in the right-hand menu of this blog!

P.S. If you're not a Facebook user and/or you're wondering how else Facebook can be used for genealogy, you won't want to miss Thomas MacEntee's presentation, "Facebook for Genealogists," one of five presentations he's giving for our Annual October Workshop this coming October 1 and 2, 2010!

Written for the 4th Edition of the Carnival of Genealogical Societies: Genealogical Societies on Facebook.

Third Carnival Of Genealogical Societies: Uniquely EWGS

Eastern Washington Genealogical Society offers something unique that probably no other society does: city directories with forwarding address (also referred to as postal directories). Hopefully everyone recognizes a page from a city directory, but these are special city directories. Someone at the post office took apart Spokane city directories, added four pages of lined paper between each city directory page and then rebound the directories in small books about an inch or smaller thick. It took about 15 books for A to Z with all the big letters separate and the smaller ones bunched up. This may seem kind of odd, but remember they added 4 pages for each city directory page, so if the city directory had 300 pages the postal forwarding books would have 1500 pages, 300 from the city directories and 1200 added pages between the city directory pages. The earliest one we have is 1903, but just one letter for 1903, 1904 and 1905. 1906 has several and from 1907 to 1940 nearly all the letters are there. 1921 is completely missing, and several years have a missing letter, but they are a wonderful resource. The last few years they did not use them much so they do not have only a few a on each of the added pages instead of nearly a whole page on the earlier years.



If you look closely at the page above you will see a line across near the middle of each column. The top of each column has a number: the left column has a 1, the right column has a 3, while below the lines are the numbers 2 and 4. Those numbers correspond to the four pages added between each city directory page. Page 1 shows postal forwarding addresses in the section labeled 1, page 2 shows postal forwarding addresses from the section labeled 2, etc.



On page 1 the first two entries are:

• Freer Dr. F.N. 126 1/2 Howard date 3-22
• Freeman Selva Toppinish, Wn G.D. (General Delivery) 4-5 and 4-8

Notice neither of these people are listed in the city directory page, so finding them here is important. This is a page from the 1911 city directory, so without this record how could you find out that Selva Freeman had moved to Toppinish, Washington. There is also an entry for Mrs. A.E. Freemore that moved with her daughters Erma and Eva to Minot, N.D. 413 Cleveland on 8-11 (August 11th). The next line contains a four-digit number 3872, but we have not figured out what that number means. We asked the post office, but our source there had never seen a book like this and had no idea what the numbers meant.



On page 2, Mrs. Jake Frei moved 5 times: first on September 14, second on October 18, third on December 8, fourth on January 23 and finally to Julietta, Idaho, Route 1 on March 12. Now how can that be? Well the city directories came out early in the year and it took someone a while to take apart the city directories and then add pages and rebind, so we are pretty sure those last two dates would actually be 1912 instead of 1911.



Note page 3 contains five ladies. The 1913 Spokane city directory was the first to list the wives. Although a few ladies were listed in the city directories before 1913, most ladies were not listed at all. These forwarding address pages are a great resource for finding female ancestors!



Notice how the surname French was divided by the line so some are on page 3 and some on page 4. This page also lists some RFD (Rural Free Delivery) addresses; usually not many RFD addresses are in a city directory!


About 10 years ago, I got a query from a gentleman looking for his grandparents. He found them in one Spokane census but not in the next, so he figured they died between censuses and was looking for their obituaries. I could not find them in the Washington Death Index so I checked the postal forwarding books, and found that they had moved to a little town about five miles from Calgary, Alberta in Canada. A few weeks later I got a big thank-you letter; that town had put the cemetery list online and his grandparents were there in that cemetery. Without these postal forwarding books they may never have found his grandparents' burial place.

Carnival of Genealogy Societies Collaboration

One reason most genealogical societies have been formed and flourished was because of collaboration. Genealogists getting together to help each other research better, and for educational opportunities. EWGS has also hosted Washington State Genealogical Society Conferences to collaborate with other societies and people from all over the northwest, but the longest and most fruitful collaboration for EWGS has been with the Spokane Public Library. Soon after EWGS was founded the members started contributing books and microfilms to the Spokane Public Library, and the library found a place for EWGS to meet. EWGS provided gene helpers so people coming to the library could get help from a genealogist. The Friends of the Library group was formed mostly by EWGS members, and it continues on today providing a lot of help for the library although I don't think many EWGS members are also members of the Friends of the Library anymore.

Has the collaboration between EWGS and the Spokane Public Library worked? Yes, both groups have benefited, EWGS has not had to rent a building and pay utilities, etc., and the library has a large genealogical collection and volunteer helpers that free up the librarians for other work.

This picture is from the newspaper and shows collaboration between EWGS and the library, to make and sell a centennial quilt for an EWGS fundraiser. Tickets were a dollar and the winner was picked on November 11, 1989, the date of the State of Washington's 100th birthday. The Centennial quilt had pictures of nine houses built about the time the State of Washington became a state. All the houses are in Washington.

The houses are the Perkins House, Colfax; the Kirkman House, Walla Walla; Boughton House, Dayton; Hallett House, Medical Lake; Mill House, Dayton; Colville Indian Agency, Chewelah; McInnis House, Davenport; McEachren House, Latah; and the Dexter House, Dayton. The library found pictures of these houses and the EWGS members selected the fabric and did the sewing.

Written for the Second Edition of the Carnival of Genealogical Societies: Collaboration.

The First Edition of the Carnival of Genealogical Societies is Published!

courtesy of the footnoteMaven

The First Edition of the Carnival of Genealogical Societies was published yesterday, March 10th at the California Genealogical Society and Library blog. The subject was Doin' Things Right! and there were 15 submissions, including two from EWGS bloggers Charles Hansen and Miriam Robbins Midkiff.

If you don't know what a blog carnival is, you're in for a treat! A carnival is an electronic publication, much like a magazine, which is all online. The articles (posts) written by different authors (bloggers) are published on the authors' own blogs, usually with a common theme (occasionally, everyone gets to pick their own theme, and this is called a "carousel" edition). The editor (host) then publishes the carnival (table of contents) on his or her blog, with links to each article. Each edition is like an issue of that magazine. There are numerous genealogy carnivals available online now; the lists can be viewed at Geneabloggers or at AnceStories' monthly Calendar of Events.

As mentioned above, the California Genealogical Society and Library blog, authored by Kathryn Doyle, is the first host of this new carnival. Kathryn has long been involved in the genealogy blogging world, but was frustrated that she could not include her society's blog in many of the genealogy carnivals, since they were personalized to writing about individuals' ancestors. The Carnival of Genealogical Societies was Kathryn's brainchild; a solution that allows genealogical societies to participate in their own carnival and publicize their societies to the Internet and the world!

I encourage you to read this first edition to learn about how EWGS and other societies are doin' it right by providing resources and working on projects, programs, and publications to serve the genealogical community.

The Obituary Index

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Eastern Washington Genealogical Society member Carol West Nettles about the Obituary Project that EWGS volunteers have been working on for the past two years. I asked how the project got started. Carol told me that someone suggested to her when she was 3rd Vice President that our society ought to have an obituary index that could be placed online for people around the globe to access. (Third Vice President of EWGS is in charge of the committees of the library volunteers, extractions, and historian.)

There are numerous collections of obituaries in the downtown branch of the Spokane Public Library. Besides the most well-known--the Patchen File in the Genealogy Room, which fellow EWGS team blogger Charles Hansen wrote about here--there are copies of obituaries that Charles located while doing lookups in his duties as society researcher, and there is a scrapbook of more in the Northwest Room. Carol said that they started indexing with the Patchen File as it was the most obvious beginning place. Currently, there are 112 drawers in the Patchen File card catalog; however, many of the cards do not contain obituaries, but are indexes to local histories, as Charles mentioned in his post. Currently, a little more than half of the obituaries from the Patchen File have been indexed by about 10 volunteers. These range from about 1910 to about 1994.

When completed, the Obituary Index will be placed online on our new website at http://www.ewgsi.org for anyone with Internet access to locate. This will be helpful information for those with Eastern Washington roots. They will be able to access the index and then can contact Charles to photocopy the obituary for a small fee which will benefit the society.

When I asked Carol if she was in need of more volunteers, she said, "Absolutely!"  Besides needing people to index the information (training is quick and painless!), she will need volunteers to do checkups and corrections once the files have been completed. Some people prefer to work in teams: one person reading the pertinent information from the card, while the other person keys it into the database. Indexing must be done in the genealogy room, either from the society computers or on your own laptop. However you choose to help, you can contact Carol here or call her (number is in the member directory).

Written for the 1st Edition of the Carnival of Genealogical Societies.

History of the Patchen File

Most older people will recognize the card file in the picture with Lee Patchen. Lee joined EWGS in 1946 out of curiosity about his ancestors. EWGS formerly met in the magazine storage room in the basement of the old main library--the Carnegie building on Cedar street. They had access to books on genealogy, but unlike other such libraries that Lee had visited, there was no card index of surnames and genealogical information. The public library could not budget funds for organizing of such an index; so Lee decided to do something about it. He started his cataloging work for the library in 1948 and went through many volumes, page by page.

One of the volumes was a bulky History of Spokane County published by the Reverend Jonathan Edwards in 1900. There were about 8,500 names mentioned, and Lee catalogued all of them. Later volumes of this book were printed with Lee's index, and I guess all those cards have been removed from the Patchen file as they are not there today.

A History of the Big Bend Country, published in 1904, yielded more than 18,000 names for his index.
Over a five year period, Lee indexed all the articles pertaining to family names in a 37 volume, Americana, a quarterly historical and genealogical magazine that last published in 1943 by the American Historical Society of New York.

The index cards contain references to articles about people and families. The cards (each 3" x 5") include data like birth date, where person lived, where he died, to whom he was married, and his parents names. I guess he finished indexing all the books in the genealogy section of the library so then he started cutting out obits from the newspaper pasting the obit on a card and typing the name of the person and when it appeared in the newspaper for each obit. He also made a card for each person listed in the obit. By the time he died in 1970, his card index contained over 200,000 index cards and Lee had personally done about 90 percent of them. EWGS then kept cutting out obits and placing them in the card file till the end of 1979. So now there are over 220,000 cards. From 1980 to 1994 the obits were either cut out and placed in a book (each with its own index) or EWGS just indexed all the obits in the newspapers for that year with the page number(s) to find that obit in the newspaper microfilms.

Most of this information was gathered from the "Patchen Memorial Booklet" done by EWGS in 1970 after Lee Patchen had died. I also wrote a post on Lee Patchen who was EWGS President in 1951 and in 1961.

Written for the 1st Edition of the Carnival of Genealogical Societies.