Over Memorial Day Weekend, I was in Evansville and had a chance to visit the public library there! My husband has a lot of family from that area and I was able to find quite a bit of information about his various family members by using an online database that the library has that provides information/clippings from the local area newspapers from the last 50 years or so. My mission while there was to photocopy obituaries that I had located using this online database.
And, mission was successful! I got a photocopy of the original obituaries and they held a trove of wonderful information! The public library there is only a couple years old and is quite nice. The staff were very helpful and I found my information in no time at all. It was great! And now, since being back home, I’ve identified several more obits that I’ll go back and get next time we go back.
On my family – I have not been doing much these past few weeks. I continue to write off for birth/death certificates. One of the counties I have been writing too has really annoyed me. They told me that they don’t do genealogy work as they don’t have the time and that if I send requests in the future it may take them weeks and weeks to pull the certificates. Now, true I have requested approximately 40 certificates from them over the past four months or so, but I usually send one request for about 5-10 certificates at a time. I provide exact death dates and follow all the instructions on their site, send the appropriate fees and send SASEs. So all they have to do is pull the book and photocopy the page. They don’t have to do any verification of the information I send — so how is that “genealogy” work. Is it not their job to pull certificates and make copies? I’m just really annoyed by that. If they are going to provide a service, they need to provide a service. And, what is most frustrating is that this is the county where I have a LOT of relatives and extended family from, so there are many certificates that I’d like to request. Whereas in the past they’d been sending them back to me within a couple of weeks, my latest request they have held for a month now and that only requested 4 certificates. So frustrating.