Spartanburg County Public library will host genealogy talk
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From goupstate.com, this coming Thursday (October 12)…
2 p.m. “Learn About Your Family Tree Under the Trees — A Genealogy Presentation.” Winnie Walsh of the Spartanburg County Public Libraries will give a one-hour presentation on genealogy and the many sources stored in the Library’s Kennedy Room of Local History and the Cleveland Genealogical Collection. We will meet on the Observation Deck at Hatcher Garden. To register, call the Kennedy Room at 596-3508.
The summary of information from Spartanburg County Public Libraries goes on with a bit more information on the Kennedy Room of Local History and the staffs assistance in finding obituary and death notices….
We list dead people
Genealogists already know how important dead people can be. The Kennedy Room staff goes to great lengths to find mention of dead people in the local newspaper and have gone back to the first issue of the Carolina Spartan in 1849.
Of course, obituaries as we know them today did not exist back then, so the Kennedy Room staff looks for mention of deaths in columns and probate notices. Sometimes there will be an article about the death of a person. The death indexes cover 1849 to 1915, 1916-1929 and 1930 to the present. If published, the person’s name, age, location of residence, spouse and date and page number of the newspaper are given in the index.
At the same time, the Kennedy Room staff has been working on a news index. The years 1960 through today are indexed. Items are regional and include happenings in Spartanburg, Cherokee and Union counties in South Carolina and Rutherford and Polk counties in North Carolina. The years 1930-1936 are also completed.
The deaths indexes are on the Web and searchable by name. To order a copy of the obituary, send $1.25 per photocopied page and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. For news items, it’s 25 cents per page and a $2 service charge and a SASE is required.
The website for the Kennedy Room, including some online resources can be found here.
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