courtesy of the St. Louis Genealogical Society
St. Louis Genealogical Society volunteers, hard at work.
In November of last year, the St. Louis Genealogical Society entered the last of 1.5 million burials, in the last of 444 open or historical cemeteries in St. Louis county and city (Oak Grove, in Normandy), into its vast and growing digital archive. Their cemetery project spanned hundreds of years of St. Louis history and sometimes involved tracking the whereabouts of bodies that had been moved three or four times due to city development projects. Now, they are at work on perhaps an even more ambitious project: to record every baptism, confirmation, marriage, and death in St. Louis history.
Carol Whitton, the director of the Genealogical Society’s new project, estimates that the project includes over 1,500 congregations, many of which have occupied multiple buildings around the city and county. Many even have multiple names or have switched denominations. Because of this, the Genealogical Society began their task by recording every St. Louis building that has ever been inhabited by a religious community. This allowed them to establish a timeline for each building that tracked what congregation inhabited that building, and at what time. So far, their list of buildings is up to 6,900.
Also see: North County's Beleaguered Oak Grove Cemetery Finally Gets its Happy Ending
Retrieving these records is not exactly a neat and tidy operation. These records go back centuries, and active congregations have to be contacted one-by-one with release requests. Once a congregation has agreed to share their records, which come in great brown boxes, each the size of a filing cabinet drawer, one of the Genealogical Society’s volunteers will go to retrieve them. If they’re lucky, these will be meticulously filed and organized and easily legible.
They are not always lucky. Lutheran records are often recorded in German script, which takes a specialist to decipher. Old Catholic records are arranged and organized in Latin. Many pages are old and yellowing, the ink fading with age. Often, the sought after records are tossed in the same box as every other written item the church has recorded: meeting minutes, tax documents, Sunday school schedules. They find them in a box labeled, simply, “records.”
Some are just plain messy. Whitton herself has had to retrieve some out of unsorted boxes in church attics. “Somebody at some point put them in a box,” she told me, “Not necessarily the same box. Not necessarily labeled.” For a situation such as this, there is nothing else to do but open every box individually and rummage through it.
Once these records are retrieved, a volunteer will scan each and every page of what is often over a hundred years of records. Once those are scanned, another volunteer will index the information of every congregant on every page. This first index and scanned image will go to another volunteer for checking, after which it is sent to another person to be proofed and added to the archive. This process will be carried out by an impressive volunteer staff of around 40 people per day until every baptized, confirmed, married and deceased soul in St. Louis’s long history has been recorded onto the Genealogical Society’s website.
Each congregation has its own informational page on the Genealogical Society’s website which displays the year the congregation was established, each historic address of that congregation, and links to each type of church record in the database. The oldest documents go back to the baptismal records for The Old Cathedral of Basilica of St. Louis the IX, which begin at 1763. Though only a fraction of the records have been updated so far, there are already thousands of names and records available online to members. For annual individual membership dues of just $40, Genealogical Society members have access to both the index itself and the actual images of every scanned document. The project is ongoing, and new records are uploaded each day, as privacy laws and time permit.
Though an estimate of names for this database is impossible to determine at this point in the project—it has only been going on for a few years, and there are still hundreds of congregations yet to be recorded—it is safe to assume that the effort will dwarf the already impressive 1.5 million names they accomplished with their cemetery project. Their former project comprised just 444 cemeteries, compared to the more than 1,500 congregations already on the Genealogical Society’s list.
Because of the scope of the project, it is anyone’s guess when it will be completed. There are a lot of church attics in St. Louis. But until then you can bet that no stone will go unturned, no box unopened until every blessed soul is added to the record.
