Saturday, February 17, 2007

Spokane-area Obit Index To Be Online

Eastern Washington Genealogical Society Second Vice President Carol Nettles announced at the last EWGS meeting that the society will be indexing the local obituary collection and eventually placing the index online. No word yet on the range of years that will be available or the newspapers to be included, but the society already houses the extensive Patchen collection, begun by librarian Lee Patchen, which includes decades' worth of several thousand obitaries clipped and filed on the old-style card-catalog index cards. In addition, obituaries from local newspapers for the years 1980 - 1996 have been copied and bound in books and also housed in the genealogy room, located on the third floor of the Downtown Library Branch of the Spokane Public Library. Society researcher Charles Hansen also does obit lookups in the microfilmed issues of the Spokesman-Review, the Spokane Chronicle, and the Spokane Press (the latter two newspapers are no longer in business). He generously donates his time in exchange for donations to the EWGS.

If your ancestors or relatives lived in Eastern Washington, this announcement is sure to be good news for you and your research!

No comments: