Where genealogy meets technology
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E-mail is just one way technology is used to help people stay connected to their past.
“A lot of people e-mail,” said Jan Louwagie, the director of the History Center. “E-mail requests have at least doubled in the last five years.”
When Louwagie or Cy Molitor of the Genealogical Society, or any volunteer receives an e-mail request seeking information on a deceased relative or a relative of a deceased relative, they will check the society’s database. Increasingly, they are using technology to compile and store years of deaths, burials and related information.
Molitor has listed 56,000 names in the Genealogical Society’s database. He’s compiled the names and locations of those buried in 140 cemeteries in the area.
“I will do more this summer,” Molitor said.
“I used to cut-and-paste and then type on an electronic typewriter,” Molitor said of compiling cemetery information.
Molitor held a stack of obituaries that had been meticulously cut from newspapers, or hand-copied from a newspaper or pasted from a funeral card.
“These are all obituaries, millions of them,” Molitor said of rows of shelves in the center.
“We did everything by hand, hand copy and hand indexed,” Molitor said.
These days, a scanner has replaced the more laborious hand work.
“It’s so fantastic,” Molitor said.
“We scan it in so we have an electronic form,” Louwagie said. “ So when people call or e-mail we have an electronic copy to be sent to them.”
SMSU student JoBeth Grismer was scanning obituaries one day this week. As she scanned the obituary of a woman with a last name that started with H and died in 2003, Grismer said she notices obituaries of young people or kids.
“Sometimes it’s a whole family, a mom, dad and three or four kids,” Grismer said. “Most of the time, it’s a car accident.”
Molitor typed in a local name, and the name, along with the spouse’s name, maiden name, children’s names and military information, popped to the screen. The database also lists the birth and date dates and the burial site.
Molitor said the database changes every day because at least a first hard copy of the obituaries from daily newspapers, weekly newspapers and funeral cards are copied and kept each day. Those daily updates will later be scanned into the electronic database.
Molitor made a Web site for the Genealogical Society several years ago. The use of the Web site has increased the past few years.
Users can access various information from the Web site and make requests for research on an individual.
Technology like Web sites and the Internet has changed how people do genealogical research, Molitor and Louwagie said.
“There used to be maybe 10 choices of Web sites,” Louwagie said. “Now they have to rank the top 50.”
Molitor said when he first started genealogical research more than 10 years ago, he needed frequent travel to courthouses and other sites that kept records.
Now, he can access information through Web sites or e-mail requests, Molitor said.
“I think some people are scared of trying (electronic research),” Molitor said.
But when people come to or contact the Genealogical Society and History Center in Marshall, they quickly learn how valuable technology is, Molitor said.
Molitor can send them or give them a CD of his list of cemeteries for a small price.
The center also has a subscription to an extensive genealogical Web site.
And there are those hundreds of obituaries that have been scanned into electronic files.
“When you lead someone into it, they can learn it fast,” Molitor said of using technology.
“People may come in scared, but when they sit down and the name gets entered, they are just elated when the name pops up with information,” Louwagie said.
While they’ve made advances in technology use for the center and the society, there seems to be more on the horizon.
There’s talk of using global positioning satellite to pinpoint the location of headstones in cemeteries, Molitor said.
“You could be in a cemetery in Lyon County and your relative in Europe could be shown where someone was actually buried,” Molitor said of GPS.
