What’s New in May

We finished transferring what we could find for the Carter County MOGenWeb project, formerly hosted at Rootsweb, from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. A lot of the MOGenWeb county sites are down and/or lost because of loss of their Rootsweb hosting, and a significant percentage of them need County Coordinators. Larry Flesher, the Missouri State Coordinator, would love to hear from you if you can help!

We heard from Justin Watkins this month and he submitted some additions/corrections for the DeJarnette Family Cemetery in Pettis County. In the good news/bad news department, he also asked, “What happened to the pictures?” This is how I found out that some database changes back in August 2016 broke many of the Pettis County cemeteries, and probably other counties as well. I really don’t know, at this point, how extensive the damage is or how long . . . [Yes! There’s more!]

How to Use Monica’s Death Notice Indexes

Monica Schirmer Eshelman spends most of her day indexing St. Joseph, Missouri, newspapers using the free Google News Archive. As she completes each year, she sends them to me, I turn them into PDFs, and they’re uploaded to the Northwest Missouri Genealogical Society website and the Cousin Collector Media Library. She’s also started maintaining the Great and Powerful Index Index of all surnames in her yearly indexes, the latest being for the years 1845-1912. She’s working on 1913 now.

As with most things, what’s clear to some is not so clear to others, and that seems to be the case with these indexes. Monica gets a lot of email from lost souls. 😀

The death notices themselves are freely available from the Google News Archive. At the top of each index page is a list of the newspapers . . . [Yes! There’s more!]