The Madison County Genealogical Society will meet on Tuesday, September 7, 6:30 pm at the Winterset Public Library. The program will provide a brief introduction to Familysearch.org to assist with your family research. FamilySearch has millions of records, is available from your home PC or phone, and has no subscription fee. All are welcome to attend.
The Madison County Genealogical Society is not meeting in August. They have been continuing their feet-on-the-ground cemetery work.
Their next meeting will be Tuesday, September 7, 6:30 pm, at the Winterset Public Library. Hope all those interested in family history will attend then.
Meanwhile, find a cool morning to check out a local cemetery . Or visit the gravestones from the comfort of your home with your computer or smart phone at http://www.iowagravestones.org
Tuesday, July 6, 6:30 pm, Winterset Public Library – Free and all are welcome.
At our upcoming monthly meeting, we will be demonstrating www.iowagravestones.org where local genealogists have posted 30,000 gravestone photos for viewing from your PC or your smartphone.
It’s very easy to access and can help immensely when you are searching for the cemetery where someone is buried or to find the actual gravestone within the cemetery. Many of the entries are linked back to Madison County’s 35,000+ online newspaper obituaries.
Small groups have been visiting McGinnis Cemetery (NW of Patterson) and Peru Cemetery to update our documentation. The Society keeps two documents for each cemetery – and alphabetical listing by surname and a row-by-row listing. Copies of both are kept in the Winterset Public Library to reference when trying to locate a gravestone, which is especially helpful within large cemeteries with multiple sections. Many thanks to member Pat Hochstetler for her continued updating of these documents.
Of course, with each new burial, the work become out of date. So the nearly 60 cemeteries in Madison County are always in need of a walk to update the documents with the latest burials, new stones for those who are not yet deceased, or death dates where there was none before.
It’s also great to have 30,000 gravestones photos uploaded to iowagravestone.org for reference on your computer and smart phones. As we take new photos, or replace old ones, the GPS coordinates are now also available online. What a help in locating a gravesite!! Retaking and processing 30,000 new photos will be a loooooong-term goal.
The Madison County Genealogical Society plans to resume their monthly in-person meetings beginning on June 1, 2021. As before, meetings will be held the first Tuesday of each month at the Winterset Public Library meeting room. The start time has been changed to 6:30 pm. The Library recommends face-masks and there is plenty of room for social distancing.
We plan to have occasional programs but our first meeting will be a chance to catch up on what genealogical adventures we’ve all had over the last 13-months since we last met.
Please mark your calendar with our future dates: July 6 — August 3 — September 7.
We hope to see you there.
The Madison County Genealogical Society will not be hosting thei
r annual Genealogy Exhibit at the 2021 Madison County Fair this July.
Due to on-going considerations surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, we feel this is best for those who enter exhibits, volunteer their time, and visit our displays. We will consider exhibiting at the 2022 County Fair at the first of the coming year.
To all who have worked, contributed, or enjoyed the display in the past,
we sincerely thank you.
For general information about the 2021 Madison County Fair, please visit: madisoncountyfair.net.
As this year draws to an end, we look back over cancelled meetings, no annual Christmas party (No snacks! No family stories!), and concerns for health and safety. Maybe you weren’t able to visit your usual genealogical haunts such as libraries and county offices.
Or, perhaps , on the other hand, it was a year when you had the time to dig into your ancestry, started some long hoped-for projects, found new resources on the Internet, or discovered new ways to connect with resources via Zoom.
In our December annual Christmas party, we usually elect officers for the coming year. Since no December meeting was held, the current officers are planning to serve in 2021 also. We feel this is a safe decision, as finding officers has been difficult for several years now. (We also have two Director positions open, if anyone is interested. The main duty is organizing the Madison County Fair exhibit, entries, and judging in July.)
Behind the scenes, the work of the Society continues with constant contributions to IAGenWeb.com/madison. During the IAGenWeb volunteer staff’s rigorous fall review, the site passed with compliments for its ease of use and the amount of data made available. Censuses are being reformatted by Kent Transier to be more readable. Pat Hochstetler, Shirley Keating, and other volunteers enter 15-25 current and old obituaries each week that Kent and Linda Smith add to the our website. And members can expect the first quarter newsletter in early February.
Madison County Genealogical Society 