Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen

Preserving Our Heritage: Supporting Local Genealogy Societies

• Kathleen Brandt • Episode 19

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Ever wondered how the unsung heroes of local genealogy societies are keeping the threads of local history and culture alive and their doors open? Kathleen uncovers the rich tapestry of contributions local societies.  By the end of our talk, you'll value these small genealogy societies not just as repositories of the past, but as vibrant storytellers preserving our collective legacy.

Here is the link to the article:
Don't Let It Happen to Genealogy Societies.

Join us in supporting our local genealogical societies. 

Be sure to bookmark linktr.ee/hittinthebricks for your one stop access to Kathleen Brandt, the host of Hittin' the Bricks with Kathleen. And, visit us on YouTube: Off the Wall with Kathleen John and Chewey video recorded specials.

Hittin' the Bricks is produced through the not-for-profit, 501c3 TracingAncestors.org.
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John:

Ladies and gentlemen from the depths of flyover country in the heartland of America, the Kansas City on the other side of the mighty moon, welcome to Hitting the Bricks with Kathleen, the do-it-yourself genealogy podcast that features your questions and her answers. I am John, your humble hubby host, wishing all our listeners a happy 2024, and welcome to new listeners from Nigeria and Singapore. Today I'll be talking to Kathleen about the battle between good and evil and the end of society as we know it. So let's start Hitting the Bricks. Okay, give me a second. I'm gonna give you all the seconds you need. Oh, let's see.

Kathleen:

Okay.

John:

Okay, but the.

Kathleen:

Is that the interview Happy?

John:

2024.

Kathleen:

I think happy 2024 is appropriate, though. Yeah, okay, fine, happy 2024. We're ready to have a dot I don't like.

John:

You don't like what? I guess. I don't like the timing. This seems awful early in the morning, even though it's 1.28, it seems awful early in the morning. I just feel like I should have had I don't know there should be a three martini lunch before we do this.

Kathleen:

No, there should be no martini lunch before we do this.

John:

So, kathleen, we started with articles, but you and I've had this conversation multiple times about genealogy, societies and libraries and support. What I'm left with is I have questions, okay, and I need some guidance, because I need to know who's Thanos and who's the Avengers, and who should I hate. That's what I'm looking for. What I need to know is who is the doctor and who are the Daleks. I want to know who's Gamora and who's Nebula. I want to know who to hate. So these societies that are growing like a fungus, destroying everybody's life as we know it. That's our conversation today, right?

Kathleen:

No, it's not John, but thanks for that intro. So first of all, I'm assuming you were talking TV shows or movies, with all of those analogies.

John:

It's a lonely house for somebody who enjoys popular media. Go ahead.

Kathleen:

And I'm also going to say that there's no one that we're going to hate. We're going to do a whole bunch of embracing, of love and energy and synergy.

John:

Oh, this is just not my show, okay.

Kathleen:

At no point are the societies a fungus or a f Any kind of fun guy.

John:

So nobody's going to be visited by three ghosts. That's disappointing.

Kathleen:

I am so sorry. No, we're not being visited by ghosts.

John:

Are there any explosions?

Kathleen:

in this episode. There are no explosions in the episode. The article I wrote.

John:

Yeah, this is coming from kind of a blog. Well, it's not kind of, it's coming from a blog that you wrote, and this was on A3Genealogyblogcom something.

Kathleen:

It was and it's on social media and on LinkedIn articles.

John:

And there were a lot of people who responded to it.

Kathleen:

It had a very high response rate, both in emails and in comments on social media.

John:

Let's recap the article and this was about the issue sometimes issue with larger libraries and societies and support for the smaller societies. Correct.

Kathleen:

That's one way to look at it. I think what I'm looking at more so when I'm talking about this is the importance of keeping small societies and local societies alive and healthy, and the reason people don't realize how important that is is because we have some of these larger genealogical libraries and repositories, which are wonderful. We love them too and we want to support them as much as we can also, but they are not a one stop shop, and that is the theme that we need all of these little local societies to help us when it comes to our research, finding original documents and understanding the culture of that town, the repositories and our ancestors.

John:

So let me get the scale of this. So tell me a concrete example of smaller local repository and a larger society or library that work together. Sure, we have a couple of those right.

Kathleen:

Last night I went to a wonderful presentation and the presentation was given by Michelle Cook and it was about the Salos Populi Project which, by the way, is part of the Missouri motto, and the Missouri motto is let the good of the people be the supreme law, which translates into the Salos Populi information and it goes on. But this group that Michelle was talking about and the work that her group was doing, they are collecting USCT colored troops records within Missouri and they're covering as many as they can to digitize and have them accessible for about seven counties and this is extremely exciting.

John:

Is this a large society or a small society? This?

Kathleen:

is a small society, but last night the presentation that she gave at the Mid-Continent Public Library was sponsored by Midwest Genealogy Center as well as Clay County Archives. That kind of synergy is needed to have the support that these societies need. There is no way she could have gotten that message out to the group of people that were both online and in-house without the support of others who also had huge databases, the names of people.

John:

So in a lot of ways this is getting outreach, expanding what is needed through kind of the megaphone of the larger societies, but the smaller societies being able to speak through their megaphone.

Kathleen:

That is absolutely correct. So that is also what we talked about with TraceyNASCISorg, which is the not-for-profit and the producer of Hitting the Bricks with Kathleen. Okay, so TraceyNASCISorg Also is looking at how can we sponsor different societies across the nation, the small societies, to give them additional platforms to increase what they need most. So this is an issue with all of our societies across the nation. And what is that issue? The issue is that the societies don't have a large enough outreach and actual support.

John:

So should there be an adoption program.

Kathleen:

There are some. There are some like friends of the library or friends of a society, and that is the most important part, because there's not enough resources, especially people resources and time. What we're looking for more volunteers, more involvement, more people knowing the importance of keeping them alive. So what would people be doing. All kinds of things. There's indexing and scanning and planning.

John:

Well, let me ask you this Is there stuff that could be done from home?

John:

Because we're I mean we're in a different world where I mean a lot of people don't want to do a drive, and if they could sit down for 15 minutes in between feeding Johnny and getting somebody to the soccer game and they could take 15 minutes and actually do something, then I think they would. But I think a lot of people don't like that investment of it's going to take me 25 minutes to drive into a particular library and then it's going to take me a half hour to get set up and then I'm going to work for an hour and then you know you're talking about half a day gone then.

Kathleen:

I think the main thing is the society is to pick a actual project and the project be divided in bite size pieces and then people can do a lot of the work on most projects from home.

John:

So it sounds like one of the primary people you would need is project manager. Yes, that, and that's that's one of the problems, I'm assuming is bringing in volunteer project managers.

Kathleen:

It's a volunteer project management program and we can't rely on just the four or five people on the board. We need more people, and a lot of people only want to support their own community, but their ancestors came from everywhere. Just because I'm in Missouri does it mean that I can't volunteer for my North Carolina ancestors or my Kentucky ancestors? I can volunteer with these other societies and maybe just give a year for that, as you're working on your own projects, and I've seen too many societies actually fade away because they're aging out and so we want to be able to attract, like you just said, the lifestyle of a younger people. So how do we get the community involved with the schools, the universities? That's one of the things we're working on with tracing ancestors. Actually, how can we get the students involved with some of the projects we're looking at?

John:

Well, okay, so if you're the recruiter for these societies, what are you looking for in somebody who can actually help you out? You don't necessarily need somebody who's in the library science program. No, it doesn't have to be an archivist. No, in order to donate time, this can be Regular people, right?

Kathleen:

These are just regular people who want to donate hours.

Kathleen:

And because a lot of things we need to do is organize what archives have. Lions, kansas I wrote about them not long ago. They have hundreds of Bibles in a vault at the library museum. No one knows what's in those Bibles. No one knows if there is a family member in those Bibles, if it has a family tree in it. No one knows anything more except the day that they received it and where they received it from. It may not even be from an individual. So again, maybe someone going through a stack of these Bibles Now something like that, people will want you to be on site because you don't want someone moving your collection off site.

John:

I could see where in some cases, you would need to be on it, but that would be the circumstance with somebody maybe once a week would go in for a couple of hours and do some indexing. I'm assuming is what we're talking about doing.

Kathleen:

That's exactly it.

John:

Okay, so if I'm a regular guy, I'm thinking we're going to go into an archive and we're going to index and I'm going to think there's no way I'm up to that because I'm just a guy and I don't know. Do I got to wear the white gloves and are these people going to mistreat me because I'm not a library person?

Kathleen:

Believe it or not, a lot of these societies aren't library people. A lot of them are just people who love the collection that they have, but a lot of it needs to be digitized. Sometimes it's just a matter of taking pictures for an hour or two of a certain collection.

John:

Are you talking about going in and taking pictures of documents?

Kathleen:

You could take pictures of documents and then, now that the pictures of the documents are on your scanner or on a flash drive, you can take that back home and defend the next two weeks just indexing and creating the database.

John:

Are there societies that allow that type of thing? Absolutely.

Kathleen:

And I have even done it for the National Archives. Well, we used to have a volunteer program for Midwest Genealogy Center. I've done indexing there. We do it for the state of Missouri all the time. I'm a volunteer for that and what they do is they upload the pictures and say please index this for us. And then there's another person who would double check all the indices.

John:

So it's not like if I do it wrong then there's no safety net. So I can do the best job, I can pass it off and somebody's going to be looking at it and going, okay, yeah, this is great, but we need to do it this way and they clean it up.

Kathleen:

In the way Midwest Genealogy used to do it. They would give us a template and we end also the way the National Archives did it we would receive a template and then our job was to do the indexing. But some of the writing is difficult, so a second eye on there is very important. Someone else is going over the information before it goes live on the internet. So now we have just step one right. We haven't scanned all of the documents, but now you know at least our holdings. What is it?

John:

that we have here. What's there?

Kathleen:

Yes.

John:

So after, let's say, the indices are done, then you might end up digging deeper in that and actually going in and digitizing that information there are two other steps we can do afterwards.

Kathleen:

We can then have someone even abstract information, which gives the researcher a lot more information and names and dates and times, and someone else can be scanning them Again. Scanning is usually on site, but that's almost step three. I mean, you've taken pictures of it, but you haven't necessarily done quality scanning to upload or to create a book out of it, something that you're doing right now, one that you're doing, yeah, the 805th Pioneer Infantry.

Kathleen:

That my great uncle, george, was in a USCT also. We are creating a book because, again, even our personal collections need to be shared with others. A lot of people don't want to do that, but it asks how they end up in addicts and not shared with the others in the world.

John:

So the idea behind it would be of course, the original 805th book that you had for uncle George was in really atrocious condition, Correct? So, it could go into a collection and kind of just molder on the shelf with anybody looking at it, worried that anybody who takes that it's just going to create more damage to it as opposed to digitizing it and then offering the digital copy into a collection.

Kathleen:

Now, in our case, it will be part of the Tracy N Ancestors collection, but it doesn't mean that we won't be sharing it publicly, because right now what happens is I get emails and someone will ask me can you look to see if my grandfather was in there or my great grandfather was in that book, and then I can look and tell them Interesting. Okay. So let's take the Jewish Genealogy Society that I was involved in. They have generational information.

John:

So you're talking about the old folks.

Kathleen:

The old folks.

John:

You're talking about us old folks, us old folks.

Kathleen:

That information is not at a larger library or a larger state society. Necessarily. It is local. This happens across America. If I go to Comanche County, Kansas, my ancestor information was in their records. It is nowhere else to be found.

John:

Are you saying that that resides with an individual? It?

Kathleen:

resides with these little societies and these little groups of people, within the synagogue, within the church society, it could be any of these little organizations that are trying to maintain history, but it's not something that necessarily the state wants, it's not something that necessarily even a county wants. It might be something just of that community. So what we want to be able to do is support all these little, small community societies and some of these are small counties, true enough, like Comanche or Rice County, but this is the way I always like to say it, that the libraries are the pillar of a community. They provide an extreme amount of services, but the local societies are the spirit of the community. A lot of times they have folklore. The folklore may not be accurate, but normally it's based on something and at least it's a place where we can document and then go back and try to verify.

John:

What does that look like? When you say the folklore, I'm picturing somebody sitting outside of a barber shop. You see, I'm getting the breakdown of how do I get Floyd the barber to get his information. That might be about the town that I'm researching into, a place where it's accessible digitally, because really we're talking about getting things migrated from the analog world of humans to the digital world of forever.

Kathleen:

So, believe it or not, there's actually a lot of places that are already starting this. That is one of our main goals. There, literally, is a site called One Place Studies. I can say all I want to do is study everything in Comanche County. I want to bring the families together, figure out how they're connected, collect the customer names. I want to be able to collect all the information for that county in one spot, and you can even add DNA with it.

John:

Okay, but where are those who sponsors those? Where are they? Is it a website? It is a website.

Kathleen:

So One Place Study is a website and you can start your One Place Study for whatever place interests you. The idea is you can bring this in to a society and have the whole society work on it if it's from that same community.

John:

But if I start, okay, so let's say I have this idea and somebody else has the same idea. Yes, so will those One Place Studies? Will they convert?

Kathleen:

Yes, Nope, you're putting it all together, you're uploading to the same website. It's synergistic, so you just get a bigger and bigger. And the idea for it to me is that at some point the community larger society or county society or state society host it also, because this way they can share oh, we partner with the community. That's very important for these large libraries to say we partner with this county's group or we partner with this African American genealogy society. The specialties of each community is what we're trying to save, and that community can be a place, it could be a culture, but we want it to be widespread, in that anyone can access the resources One Place Studyorg.

Kathleen:

Yeah, that's one.

John:

Okay, so One Place Studies is wwwone-place-studiesorg.

Kathleen:

That is correct. There's no spaces.

John:

There's two hyphens and that's the One Place Studies we're talking about. So let me ask you this Is this the place where let's say that I Comanche County? So I could start one there, but there might be one already existing right, so you're going to check to see. Okay, and so then I would be contributing to that other One Place Study.

Kathleen:

And I can tell you according to the One Place Study. There's none in the state of Kansas. There's none, not what I'm looking at. I see it. There are 36 of them. I think in the United States you could also do a surname study is separate and that is by a particular last name. I looked it up when we were doing the podcast of the Canard family.

John:

Taste that with some. I think it was yeah uh Begau. Yes, alexis, alexis Begau.

Kathleen:

That was one of the places. I went to to find out the different names that were pertinent to that job.

John:

Okay. So now let's talk for a second about some personnel issues, because this is one of the conversations we've had is that we have some people in these local societies who have a fantastic depth of knowledge about what's on the shelves, but they're not going to be the ones that actually digitize this. What I understand in some cases is a certain level of ownership, yes, that they become kind of covetous of what they have and they want to protect it for all the right reasons. That's correct. So it seems to me there has to be something where it's like okay, there needs to be some sort of partnership developed so that they understand that what they're doing is really important.

John:

But these documents have to be released at some point in order to be converted and digitized, or those documents will disappear. They're subject to water, fire, age or handling. It only takes one little thing to completely wipe out a collection. Thomas Jefferson would be able to talk about that with the first Library of Congress, and that is correct. You know, two-thirds of it was lost, but the fact is that if it's real, it's going to have to be converted.

Kathleen:

And another reason why we need to digitize Local society. Members are from that community. In small-town America people will trust more their local people than a large society or a large library coming in and saying we want that collection that you have. We have a case that I'm working on right here in Kansas City of a doctor who all of the records are in a basement, but where to donate them is a whole other issue and the problem is the society level, the people from the community that know them that they trust. That's why we need these little small societies.

John:

From my perspective I'm going to contribute. As far as acquiring those things for digitization is that either the scanning technology is so fast now or the quality from a cell phone is completely appropriate for 99% of any job you would do digitizing documents. Documents can be put through other programs and being able to turn those into OCR, to optical scan or turn them into searchable text documents, so those things can be done. Like you were saying, you could go in, get the digitization done and then index afterwards.

Kathleen:

That's what most of us do now. Right, because there's a full project management time element that we have to pay attention to. I think there's so much that we can do, but the key to the article I wrote is not pitting library versus society is how can libraries and the societies work together to get some of these other documents readily available and keeping the societies alive? The larger libraries they still care about all of the genealogy and the historical aspects, but they are not on site. Where these places are, they don't necessarily know about where were the corpse buried in mass graves in 1833 due to the cholera epidemic, but didn't have headstones. A hundred years later, you're not sure where that mass grave is. The people from this local area they know because they have heard it all their lives. So this is very important that we keep that knowledge living, recorded, documented and passed on through these local societies.

John:

The information that we collect and that we find important might not be used in the way we anticipate. The distribution of that information 20 years from now can be entirely different than anything we can envision, but the important part to me would be getting it into a format so that it can always be accessed. Let somebody else choose how it's used, but preservation is the number one choice there, and obviously I am disappointed because there's nobody to hate. There's nobody to make a villain in this.

Kathleen:

The whole point was I don't know why. The larger libraries, I think should have a responsibility to also supporting region and helping hand, even if it's in distribution, meaning the programs these small societies have. The larger libraries have a much larger database and information and they do a monthly journal or newsletter. Why not be able to put that in there? It is not necessarily just a cost issue. It really is. The outreach is needed.

John:

So again, those libraries becoming a megaphone for the smaller societies and being able to funnel that, as opposed to trying to collect it, to absorb it, they should be going. It's not us, but through us you'll find the smaller societies and be a directory for those. So if they do have somebody who wants to volunteer at the library but doesn't want to come in, maybe the library can direct to a smaller society that's more local to the person.

Kathleen:

That is absolutely correct and we're seeing libraries work with the smaller societies. Midwest Genealogy Center and the Clay County Archives worked with this very small society but it's great if they can say oh, we partner with the Midwest African American Genealogical Society. They have a lot of experts and also an artifacts and we can help you get connected if you need that.

John:

Okay, so we talked about a bunch of stuff, but just quickly to recap, one place studies.

Kathleen:

Yes, you seem to like that.

John:

John, Because it seems so valuable that you could just you could pick a place and actually digitize and upload and contribute to a study Study of a place.

Kathleen:

Exactly.

John:

So there's a lot of value in that. We also talked about the smaller societies and they need help. So we talked about a lot of the ways people could help. But you should check how would I find my local society if I wanted to find one?

Kathleen:

I normally start with the historical societies for the state or the historical genealogical societies. Many of them already have a list for everyone to go to.

John:

So I could go online and check with my state genealogical society and probably find a lot of the local people who I could contribute to or even call and volunteer for maybe.

Kathleen:

Absolutely so what they have is normally a list that says here are all the Kansas genealogical societies that we have recorded, and hopefully the local societies are also making sure that the state know they exist.

John:

And that would be one of those things where I could then call and see what they need and if maybe I fit as a volunteer for what they currently need, or maybe just put my name in a hat for time in the future.

Kathleen:

That's what they need. They need people to be willing to do the legwork.

John:

So another thing I thought was interesting, like what I've been doing with the 805th book, documenting your own family history and your own family documents, like the front pages of Bibles, yearbooks, maybe funeral programs or cut out obituaries those types of things you should be doing in order to have them available in the future.

Kathleen:

Yes, a lot of the libraries will collect the yearbooks, but the other items, those need to be digitized, first of all for your own records but also for the local societies, and, as you're doing it, you should be writing an index or something that looks like a finding aid, so that we know what's in that collection that you're giving to the local society.

John:

So this went a lot better than I thought it was going to go. Are we able to start that three martini lunch now? Well, congratulations, you've made it to the end of another episode. Thanks so much for staying. Thanks to Chewy Chewbacca Brandt, our part-time lamp lighter and full-time miserable slinker, for his unwavering lack of interest in anything we're doing. The theme song for Hitting the Bricks was written and performed by Tony Fisknuckle and the Gluons Watch for their next appearance on the Moons of Jupiter. You can find us on Apple, spotify, youtube and, of course, buzzfraut, wherever you listen to your favorite shows. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast, so stop by our Facebook page at Hitting the Bricks with Kathleen and let us know.

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Kathleen Brandt

Host
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John Brandt

Co-host