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Health & Fitness

Library provides hard-to-find resources for those who want to want to research their family history

Learn more about your family with the help of the jefferson County Library's genealogy department.

Genealogy and family research is not for the faint of heart. It takes time and it can require some thinking outside of the box. But the rewards are worth it to many. 

Some have researched their family histories across centuries and continents; one man I know of found a second family he never knew he had. Thorough family research requires access to resources that you simply won’t find with a Google search. 

Luckily, the Northwest Branch of the Jefferson County Library has a genealogy department. Whether you want to find information about family from far away or from right here in Jefferson County, the library offers a variety of great resources that is only topped by the knowledge and helpfulness of the genealogists on staff. 

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I frequently see commercials for Ancestry.com. Ancestry is a fabulous website with access to a great deal of family records. But users soon discover that for complete access to Ancestry’s family records, they need to pay for a subscription to the website.

The library offers free access for library cardholders not only to Ancestry, but also to Heritage Quest and Footnote. These aren’t websites- these are comprehensive collections of records- census, naturalization, military- you name it, collected together and organized in a way easy to navigate.

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Heritage Quest is only made available to libraries, and was provided due to funding by the Jefferson County Genealogical Society and the Friends of the Northwest Branch. These are fabulous resources, provided free of charge, that you simply can’t get without the library. 

So it’s especially frustrating when I hear someone say “Who needs the library? It’s all on the internet!” Every librarian has heard that and sighed at some point. 

For genealogy research, the library is one of the only places you can go to find local history. You won’t find much more than a Wikipedia entry for High Ridge on the internet. 

But the genealogy department is rich with local history. Here you can find photos of local buildings and people, town histories and some family histories.  There is a vertical file that contains collected articles from local papers dating back to the 1800s. 

Genealogy staff has been laboriously creating an index of Jefferson County newspaper notices, saving a lot of time for patrons who want to find information buried in spools of microfilm. They have gone through every page of old newspapers on microfilm, starting in 1866 and going well into the 1930s, and recorded what they found. 

This allows patrons to do name searches at their leisure on our website, find what they need, and either visit the library to look at the microfilm, or pay staff to print up to 5 articles and mail to them.  Who else has that?

While there are scores of records and publications about Jefferson County, it doesn’t stop there.

The robust genealogy section has resources about other Missouri counties, different states, and even different countries. So once you get started researching family in Jefferson County, you don’t have to stop there. 

And if you wouldn’t know where to start with a genealogy search, luckily there are two trained genealogy staff who can help you get started.  Now, they won’t do the searching for you--where’s the fun in that?

But they will point you in a good direction, brainstorm with you when stumped, and fill you in on resources you and I both probably didn’t know existed. They know their stuff! 

Just make sure to call ahead if you’ll need that kind of assistance--nothing is more disappointing than coming to get help with serious research on your day off and finding that you’re on your own. 

Now, there are limits to what can be found and researched in the genealogy department.  While some people are able to find old Jefferson County land deeds and marriage records, others will discover that some are only accessible by heading to the courthouse. 

That’s just part of the scavenger hunt that is family research. 

Historical records can be hard to obtain. After all, you can’t buy a family history from any book vendor.  Much of the strength of the genealogy department depends on contributions from the community--and I don’t mean money. 

You might be surprised by how many people ask for copies of old Jefferson County phone books and yearbooks, of which they don't have many.

So in these two areas, they rely on donations from the public.  If you have old yearbooks from Jefferson County schools, think about giving them a new home.  After all, you could clear up a bit of shelf space in your house, yet be able to look at your old yearbooks whenever the nostalgia hit.  And if you have Jefferson County phone books from before 1990, the genealogy department is about the only place in town that would take them. 

Simply put, if you have even a little bit of interest in your family history and you have some time, stop by the genealogy section of the Northwest Branch. Stop by for a minute, stay for an hour and get hooked for life. 

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