Madison
County Genealogical Society
Minutes of the Meeting - October 9, 2014
The October 2014 meeting of the Madison
County Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on
Thursday, October 9, at 7:00 pm.
President, Robert Ridenour, called the meeting to order.
GIFT
MEMBERSHIPS AVAILABLE
Do you have a family member that is
interested in (or even obsessed with) genealogy? A membership in the Madison
County Genealogical Society would be a very thoughtful gift. A gift card will
be sent to the recipient of any gift membership.
The following memberships are available:
Individual/Family Annual Membership $20.00
Patron Annual Membership $30.00
Life Membership $250.00
Contact our Secretary, Petie Hunter, at petie8135@att.net,
about a gift membership.
October
Meeting
On October 9, 2014, Dr. Steve Kerber,
University Archivist & Special Collections Librarian at SIU-Edwardsville's
Lovejoy Library, presented a program titled, A Look at the Archives at SIU-E.
The Lovejoy Library at SIUE has had a
University Archive and Special Collections unit since 1980. It began with a
gentleman who was a faculty member in history. In anticipation of his
retirement, he was asked to come work in the library. We are mostly about
collecting the historical records of the university, but we also collect other
materials relating to the history of the region comprised of the counties that
make up the Metro-East Area and the St. Louis Metropolitan area. Most of the
materials that we have are stored in the building that houses Supporting
Services, e.g., the Campus Police Department. Therefore, we do not do a lot of
"just drop in visits" these days because 90% of our material is not
in the library. If any of you wish to do any research, it would be to your
advantage if you would give the library a couple days' notice in case the
material you want to see has to be retrieved from another building.
The library does not aggressively collect materials in the area of family
history and genealogy. That is because there are no academic programs that
teach genealogy and family history. We do have a few things that might be of
interest to the family historian/genealogist.
What the library and archive is doing now is to reach out on the Internet and
deliver our material in that fashion. Partly due to finances, but mostly to try
and serve a broader audience. In the past two to three years, the library has
established a program for scanning and publishing on-line collections held by
archives and special collections. Several of the collections relate to the
history of the University. We have scanned the yearbooks - The Muse - from the
1960s; we have scanned the alumnus magazine - the magazine put out by the
alumni association in print - for about 30 years. We have scanned the official
campus newspaper (as opposed to the Alestle, the student newspaper) up until
the time it was created digitally. We have scanned other collections as well.
We have a couple collections that document the history of the sport of soccer
in the U.S., especially in the St. Louis area. These may be some of the most
complete collections of soccer history in the world.
We are doing more and more in the way of trying to make it less necessary for
people to visit us in person. In addition to what we refer to as our digital
library collections, there is also similar activity going on. The library has
established what is called a digital institutional repository. Basically, what
this is supposed to be is the equivalent of a university archive in the 21st
century. That will include university generated documents and publications that
are born digitally, i.e., created using digital technology. Recently, we have
gone back and scanned all of the annual reports of the SIU System Board of
Trustees from 1949 to the time the records began to be created digitally. Also
scanned were a number of transcripts of oral history interviews that were done
in the early 1990s. More of this is planned in the future. Some of it does
relate to genealogical resources.
Around 1982, the Clerk of the Madison County Circuit Court, Willard Portell,
came to the President of SIUE, Earl Lazerson, and asked if some of the
naturalization records that were stored in downtown Edwardsville could be kept
at the University because they were strapped for space. President Lazerson
agreed to that and a significant portion of the overall number of
naturalization records of Madison County were sent to SIUE. Since these were
court records, they are public records and could not belong to the university.
They belong to the circuit court and are under the jurisdiction of the Illinois
Supreme Court, The majority of these records were in very old-fashioned metal
filing cabinets with very tall narrow drawers and they were folded in thirds.
In addition, there were 63 ledger book indexes to the actual file drawers.
However, there were other things than naturalization records in what was sent.
The documents were primarily proceedings of law cases regarding people suing
for monetary damages and proceeding in chancery people suing to force an action
plus the naturalization records.
The university library was supposed to be about helping people to use the
material in the library, and at the same time, it was a liability for the
library since they were now responsible for the safekeeping of the records. A
solution was worked out after a few years by negotiations between the Illinois
State Archives and the Circuit Court Clerk. It was decided that the case
records would go to SIU Carbondale to the branch of the Illinois Regional
Archives Depository located there, and the naturalization records would stay at
SIUE.
Recently, on very short notice, the Illinois State Library in Springfield
announced a grant competition to create digital collections. SIUE has submitted
an application to get funding to digitize the naturalization records for
Madison County that are in the custody of Lovejoy Library. Over the years,
probably over a thousand people from all over the United States have been
looking for ancestors who may have been naturalized in Madison County. The
demand for the information is out there. What will be accomplished if the grant
is received is the records will be digitized, put on-line, and be easily
searchable. Hopefully, the data will be searchable as a whole for groups that
immigrated together, came from the same town, etc.
This presentation, which was co-sponsored by the Edwardsville Public Library, was very well attended, very well received, and produced several questions and comments from the audience.