Sean C. Morgan
The Sweet Home Genealogical Society launched a new website, featuring tools to locate information contained in its library, Dec. 15.
“This is a cool website,” said President Marge Lillich.
The URL is shgenealogy.com.
“This is a redo,” said Vice President Ardys Vaughn.
The site was created by a new company, All Knight Productions, which specializes in genealogical history and museum websites, Lillich said. The creator, a Florida resident, built a site for his mother’s genealogy club. After that site went up, genealogy groups from neighboring counties began asking for sites.
The company has built a network of about 50 sites now, and it’s still growing, Vaughn said.
“We’ve been working on it since the end of May,” Vaughn said. The society has received six weeks of training to maintain and build the site.
One of the biggest reasons for building a new site was the control the society has now.
Members can now add and change information, Vaughn said.
“A website is our entrance into what our society has to offer,” she said. “What we have here is our library listings, all of our books, microfilms, CDs, that we have housed in here.”
“Say you live in Alaska but your whole family lived here, say from the 1850s,” Vaughn said. The website will show what’s available in Sweet Home.
It includes a searchable database of obituaries from The New Era, from 1930 to 1969, Lillich said, and more will be added over time.
The site also lists local cemeteries, Vaughn said. So far it lists Finley, Ames and Lewis cemeteries locally. Finley is finished, with photos of each headstone and a database of the information contained on the headstones. More will be added, but it will take time to take photos and gather the information.
“That’s why Gilliland is in progress,” Lillich said of the largest cemetery in the area.
The information can be sorted by names, dates and other information.
Want to know the oldest grave in the Sweet Home area? Clearly enthusiastic, Vaughn breaks into a grin and sorts by date of death. The sort quickly shows Samantha Vawter’s and Amandy Finley’s headstones, from1857 and 1858 respectively, at Finley as the oldest currently in the database.
The site will contain an index of photos from Eggan Photography, a long-running former photography studio, Vaughn said. The society has possession of Eggan’s negatives.
“This website will never ever be done,” Lillich said. The society will add searchable data for years to come.
“We don’t just have information from Sweet Home,” Vaughn said. “We have information from just about every state.”
Researchers visiting the site can identify the resources they need and contact the club with their requests, Vaughn said. From there, the society can copy the information and send it to the researchers.
The site includes a store where visitors can order the society’s photo book, the 2013 calendar and Mona Waibel’s four volumes of Sweet Home history based on her monthly column in 55 Plus, “Remembering the Good Ol’ Days.”
Lillich and Vaughn noted the colors of the site are green and gold in honor of the Sweet Home Huskies.
The Sweet Home Genealogical Society operates its library, located at 1223 Kalmia St., from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays and 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturdays. On the fourth Tuesday of the month, it is open until 8 p.m.
For more information about the society, call (541) 367-5034.