Family Heritage Center to be Built in Chesterfield

RESEARCHERS OF FAMILY ROOTS WILL GET OWN HOME

BY STEPHEN DEERE
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
06/14/2010

CHESTERFIELD -- One of her ancestors fought alongside Daniel Boone in the Revolutionary War.

Another was a famous Indian chief in New York in the 1600s. Yet another was a clockmaker from Switzerland who came to Baltimore in 1794.

"I still have hopes that one of his clocks will be in a store somewhere," said Joyce Loving, an avid genealogist and the special-collections manager at St. Louis County Library headquarters in Ladue.

Loving was put in charge of the library's genealogical records in 1998. Back then, her department consisted of a single desk on the library's fourth floor.

 

Today, she oversees a staff of 12, and the department boasts more than 50,000 books, 850 periodicals and 18,000 rolls of microfilm. Parts of the collection are on each of the headquarters' five floors.

But soon the collection will get a place of its own, the latest sign of how genealogy research has boomed in recent years.

The St. Louis County Library Foundation is designing a 60,000-square-foot Family Heritage Center in Chesterfield at the corner of Wild Horse Creek and Baxter roads, with the goal of opening it in 2012.

It will be one of just five free-standing genealogy libraries in the country. The others are in Houston, Independence, Mo., Boston and Salt Lake City, long considered the mecca of genealogical research.

"We will be on a very short list," said Ann Fleming, treasurer of the St. Louis Genealogical Society. "It's a real coup."

The foundation, a nonprofit that raises money for the library, started talking about plans for a new genealogy library a couple of years ago. The foundation approached Louis Sachs, of Sachs Properties, about buying six acres of his Downtown Chesterfield development.

But the idea so enthralled Sachs that he donated the land for the center, said Kathy Higgins, president of Sachs Properties. Higgins said her boss, a longtime benefactor of the arts, has also sought to preserve the region's history, naming streets and developments after settlers such as Justus Post and August Hill.

Because the center is still in the design phase, officials say they don't have precise cost estimates yet. Jim Bogart, the foundation's manager, said all of the money for the new library will be raised privately. The foundation began its fundraising effort earlier this month. It hopes to break ground on the Heritage Center sometime this year.

Sachs Properties may contribute to the construction costs, Higgins said.

"It was the perfect fit," Higgins said.

A GROWING HOBBY

Fueled by the Internet, social media sites that allow relatives to reconnect, and retiring baby boomers with newly found free time, genealogy is quickly becoming one of the nation's most popular hobbies. It's even the subject of a reality television show on NBC, "Who Do You Think You Are?"

Online databases now allow people to perform in a few hours the kind of research that used to take months.

Paul Nauta, spokesman for the website familysearch.org, said the site receives about 10 million hits a day, and the number is growing. The site is owned by the Family History Library in Salt Lake City.

"We see no end in sight," Nauta said of the boom in family research.

Despite all the information online, Nauta said, only about 7 percent of genealogical records can be found on the Internet.

"Just because you do a search online and don't find what you're looking for, don't make the mistake of thinking it doesn't exist," he said.

And local libraries are repositories of all kinds of vital information that has yet to be put online, such as church, estate and cemetery records, family histories, city directories, periodicals and immigration and naturalization records. The county library here even has a collection of more than a 100 "Yizkor" books memorializing Jewish communities destroyed in the Holocaust.

Plus, Nauta said, libraries that specialize in genealogy often offer something the Internet can't: dedicated staff to help mentor people just starting out.

Most genealogists have encountered a life-altering event, such as a death in the family, which causes them to ask questions about where they come from, Nauta said. The average age of a family researcher is between 45 and 75, he said.

For Joyce Parke, of Troy, Ill., that event occurred when her husband's grandmother moved in more than 30 years ago and often told stories about her relatives. Parke became fascinated and eventually traced one of her lines to the 1700s in Jamestown, Va.

"It's the fun of the search," Parke said.

One night last week, Parke waited outside the St. Louis County Library's auditorium to hear a lecture on military records from the world wars at a meeting of the St. Louis Genealogical Society. She had just returned from Memphis, where she was looking up information about her father's family. Her quest to fill in her family tree has taken her all over the country to look at court, land, criminal and other records.

"I devote a lot of time to it," she said.

CONNECTION TO HISTORY

For almost a decade, Bill and Pat Roth have traveled to St. Louis from Pittsburgh to research the German ancestry of Bill's father. Last week, they pored over microfilm in the county library's special-collections department. His father's family spent some time in the area, and many old German records are still here.

At the library, Bill Roth once found records from St. Marcus United Church of Christ documenting the birth and marriage of his great-grandparents.

Over the years, he has put together a family tree with more than 3,000 names. Still, Roth can't answer some key questions, such as why his ancestors left Europe.

"Germany had a lot of political unrest during the middle of the 1800s," Roth said. "A lot of them took off for better opportunities. I wish I could have talked to them to find out what exactly made them pick up and leave."

Roth's desire to recreate his heritage took him as far away as Germany, to a small village north of Frankfurt. There, he said, he met long-lost relatives and visited homes where his forefathers lived. Loving said it's the connection family researchers feel to history that keeps them digging. With a new building, she'll have more space to collect thousands of more records to help others enjoy learning about their past.

Loving herself understands the draw. When she learned one of her ancestors fought at the Battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky with Daniel Boone, she read all about the fight. The battle was one of the last of the Revolutionary War. In fact, the war had already ended, but word hadn't yet reached the soldiers.

A few years ago, Loving and her husband traveled to Kentucky to watch a re-enactment.

"My ancestor knew Daniel Boone," she said. "I just think that's really exciting."