GenealogyClassBlog

TGS Online Funeral Home Index

This morning I responded to a Tulsa, Oklahoma message board that you can find on RootsWeb.com. I realized that what I had written may not be seen there by many who might need to know about this valuable resource for Tulsa research. So, I’m offering an edited version here.

The Funeral Home Records of Tulsa was published in twelve volumes by the Tulsa Genealogical Society beginning in 1989. Through their work, it isn’t necessary to search through years of records to find the name of a person that you’re looking for.

There is an index to the first ten volumes available online the Society’s website, http://www.tulsagenealogy.org/library/FuneralHomeIndx.asp, with which anyone can search for a name of someone whose record was handled by one of numerous Tulsa funeral homes. For those names that are listed in this cumulative index, you will find a volume and page number, which would lead you to additional information.

There are a few Tulsa funeral homes that are not included, but you can see by visiting the web site above that they do have lots of funeral home records — some as late as 1984, but most up until 1980, and as early as 1906. The following are covered in the first ten volumes and the index (for information about the last two volumes, look for Publications at the TGS web site):

• Moore’s Funeral Home, Moore’s Memory Chapel, and Moore’s Eastlawn
• Ninde’s Funeral Home
• Whisenhunt’s Funeral Home
• Stanley’s Funeral Home
• Winterringer Funeral Home
• Lane Funeral Home
• Coulter-Brown Funeral Home
• Fitzgerald Funeral Home
• Heath-Griffith Funeral Home

For instance, Volume 1 includes the records of Moore’s Funeral Home for 1927-1955, extracted carefully by TGS members. TGS offers the volume for sale or will send a copy of the page with a self-addressed, stamped envelope and $1 per page (mail to P. O. Box 585, Tulsa 74101). Additional contact information, membership information, and descriptions of all of their publications may be found at their web site.

The entire set of Funeral Home Records of Tulsa may be found at the

• TGS Library, 9136 E. 31st St. (918-627-4224)
• Tulsa City-County Library’s Genealogy Center (918-746-5222; genaskus@tulsalibrary.org)
• TCCL’s Research Center (918-596-7977; http://www.tulsalibrary.org/askus/).

I would suggest an e-mail or phone call to any of these libraries to learn the funeral home, date and place of birth and date and place of death, of the person you find in the TGS online index Or, purchase or locate a print copy of the Cumulative Funeral Home Index.

Footnote.com's Interactive Census Project Page

I was excited today to see this post by Dick Eastman. Footnote.com has just announced their plans to provide access to the entire U.S. Federal Census with the help of the National Archives. Dick’s blog post includes a long statement from Footnote.com about the unique capibilities that users will have of interacting with the census images. In class Tuesday we discussed tagging the images so that they are more searchable. That is only a small example of what you could do as a member of Footnote.com.

I currently have a subscription to Footnote.com, which has a reasonable price for what they offer. We’ll visit Footnote.com some more during next week’s class.

For more information, you should follow  http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2009/10/entire-us-census-goes-interactive-with-footnotecom.html.

When reading my email from Dick Eastman today I learned about an article that he is recommending. The author of the article is Julie Miller and the article appeared in yesterday’s Broomfield (Colorado) Enterprise. Here is a link to his post:
Tips for Finding Females

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Christine Rose, CG, CGL, FASG

When a snow storm on the morning of 28 March caused the Tulsa City-County Library to close all of its locations, the genealogy workshop being held at Hardesty Library had to be cancelled after the lunch break. Christine Rose, CG, CGL, FASG had presented two of four planned lectures and those of us in attendance were sorry to have to miss the remaining two. Christine is an excellent speaker and has extensive experience with courthouses and with teaching and lecturing.

Kathy Huber, Genealogy Librarian, arranged to have Christine return this Saturday, 17 October, to present those two lectures plus two more. The day’s topics will be:

• “County Land Records”
• “Using Little-Known Sources”
• “Leaping to Erroneous Conclusions” and
• “Solving Problems in 25 Hours or Less.”

The day’s workshop begins at 9:30 am, at Hardesty Library in the Redbud Auditorium, with two morning lectures and two more after a lunch break. After time for questions, the workshop will conclude at 4:00 pm.

When she was here in March, attendees had the opportunity to purchase some of the books she has written. Possibly this will be true again on Saturday. TCCL has some in its collection, including some that may be checked out. Check the Catalog.

The new year of genealogy classes at Boston Avenue United Methodist Church has begun. I am again teaching five weeks of classes, with two different courses scheduled each Tuesday evening. The first is called “Genealogy:  Family History Basics” and meets from 6:30 to 7:30. And the second session, which is designed to complement the first (and give me a place to enhance and improve genealogy lectures), is called “Five Genealogy Talks,” and meets from 7:45 to 8:45.

The topic of last Tuesday’s first hour was “Important First Steps.” The class members and I introduced ourselves to each other and we discovered that most of class consisted of beginners, who are just starting out. We have a mother-daughter couple and a grandmother-granddaughter couple, but no husband-wife couples this time.

The second hour was made up of almost the same group of students. The topic for the week was, “How Do You Know? Understanding Evidence and Citing Your Sources.”

I plan to post some more details about each of these sessions very soon.

Next week’s first hour topic will be “The Census,” about one of my favorite genealogy resources. This is a resource that many beginning genealogists can use, but that experienced genealogists use as well. Ancestry.com, and some other commercial and private sites, offer access to the digital images of the United States Federal census or to transcriptions of the contents of the census. We’ll learn what the census contains and about how we can access it.

The second hour’s topic will be “Information Overload:  Organizing Your Genealogy Records.” We’ll learn about how to organize the names, dates, places and relationships, as well as how to organize research plans and notes, and how to organize the stacks of paperwork genealogists seem to generate.