Barnesville Library helps to develop genealogy database
In 2006, the Barnesville Hutton Memorial Library, joining several other libraries in Ohio, partnered with the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in helping to create the Ohio Obituary Index.
The Belmont County Genealogy Society and the staff of the Barnesville Library have been working during those years to enter the obituaries of The Barnesville Enterprise from 1943-through the present. The next task will be to enter the information from the Barnesville Obituary file housed in the genealogy room of the library.
In December, the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center was notified by Ancestry.com of its addition to their database. The press release reads as follows.
"The Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center's popular Ohio Obituary Index became even more popular on January 2010 when Ancestry.com merged the Index with its huge online database. Ancestry is a subscription-based genealogy research Web site with more that four billion records online and more being added daily. Although the Obituary Index will remain on the Hayes Web site www.rbhayes.org/index and always will be free to the public, the duplication on Ancestry.com has generated a lot of excitement in the genealogy community.
Because of the Ancestry merge, orders for obituaries found at the Hayes Library have quadrupled over the same time as last year, and they are coming in from all over the country and world. From Alberta Canada, "Thanks for what you, your staff and volunteers are doing." From London, England "your Web site and ordering system has been clear and easy to use."
Obituaries are a great tool for building your own family history. Genealogists have long found that obits can help flesh out the bare bones of a skeletal family tree.
The Ohio Obituary Index was compiled from original newspapers by Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center Library staff and volunteers. Starting in 2001, other Ohio libraries started entering data into the Index, so it now extends beyond the holding of the Hayes Presidential Library. As of this date, 42 libraries are partners in the Ohio Obituary Index and are indexing old and current newspaper entries, totaling more that 1.5 million obituaries from 1810 -2010. In the beginning, the Index covered complete indexing of newspapers from Sandusky County, but now includes indexing from almost every northwest Ohio county. Other Ohio counties with good coverage include Wayne, Washington, Auglaize, Ross, Gallia, Belmont, Highland, Franklin and Clark counties. See the map on the top page of the Hayes Web site for all the partner libraries.
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