Cape County Genealogical Society turns 50

In May of 1970, a genealogy society began in Cape Girardeau County, with a meeting of 25 people at Riverside Regional Library in Jackson.

Earl Oldham, as an assistant librarian at Riverside, told the Southeast Missourian in 1970 that the society is open to anyone interested in the study of genealogy in the region, and that’s true today. Fifty years later, the Cape Girardeau County Genealogical Society has about 70 active members, and has come a long way from microfilm and paper-based family trees.

Current vice president and past president Bill Eddleman joined the society while he was still living in Rhode Island in the early 1980s.

“If you want to learn about Cape Girardeau County genealogy, it’s really the place to go,” Eddleman said.

Eddleman noted that while many records are online, not everything is.

“My guess is, probably about 25-to-30% of what’s really valuable for genealogy is online,” he said.

One issue is, the census did not record family relationships within a household until 1880, and prior to the 20th century, systematic recordkeeping was not necessarily the standard, he said — birth dates and death dates might not match from record to record, even if they refer to the same person, for example.

Furthermore, while some counties have scanned in some records and posted them online, that’s far from the story across the board. Some records are available only in person. Others were destroyed or lost to fire or natural disaster.

“The local experts are the genealogical societies,” Eddleman said.

Eddleman — who also works for the State Historical Society of Missouri, owns Eddleman Genealogical Consulting LLC and has taught several workshops on how to conduct genealogical research — said that a lot of what he’s learned about the process, he’s learned from being in the genealogical society or attending the society’s events.

Drew Blattner, society president and Cape Girardeau County recorder, said he’s always been interested in family history and genealogy, and, like Eddleman, has family roots in the region.

Blattner said he did a lot of his early research using the society’s collection, housed at the Cape Girardeau County Archive Center in Jackson, and when he started to work at the center, he’d stay for the society’s meetings.

Blattner said many people interested in genealogy go online to ancestry.com or to search engines to look up records.

“Since its beginning 50 years ago, the Genealogical Society was very active in going through the county’s records and indexing them,” Blattner said.

The society’s website at www.capegenealogy.org also has a list of publications and updates on the group’s activities.

Blattner said a recent inquiry came in from a library in Colorado about some of the society’s publications.

“There could be descendants of Cape Girardeau County residents who go to that library and want to do research,” Blattner said. “That’s a great thing the society has done.

“We’re fortunate in our county that the records have been preserved so well,” Blattner added. “You don’t have that in all counties. So many courthouses were burned in the Civil War and records are gone. Other occurrences, natural disasters, instances of arson, or just carelessness, means records were lost or disposed of.”

Blattner said the society owns a large library of books and a large collection of microfilm, which includes records from churches. Some of the records are in German, “but you can make names and dates out. They’re generally easy to read.”

Blattner said that in the early days of the society, many volunteers were dedicated to projects involving transcribing and indexing records, helping to document cemeteries, and so on.

“That’s something, as we go forward, the society could always use, whether it be somebody who is willing to volunteer to transcribe or index records, or help with a request for research,” Blattner said.

Society members Dorothy Rowley and Betty Voss put together an exhibit at the Cape Girardeau County History Center at 102 S. High St. in Jackson celebrating the group’s 50th anniversary.

Voss said she joined the society about 20 years ago, and has learned a lot and met people from across the country who are interested in families with ties to Cape Girardeau County.

Rowley joined the group in the early 1980s, and said she’s learned a lot about research.

“It’s sort of like detective work,” she said. “You have to do some digging and try to figure out how some of these people are connected to me.”

When she first got into genealogy, Rowley said, she typed up her family history on a manual typewriter.

“At that time, a lot of information wasn’t available,” Rowley said. Also, “Through the years, I’ve found out that maybe the information, especially dates, might have been a little off.”

Rowley said she thinks online resources give researchers a great starting point, but there’s a lot to take into consideration. People may have had a given name that was different than the name they went by, for example, and it might not be consistently recorded.

Knowing the region’s history and how immigrants moved in and through various cities and counties is especially helpful, Rowley said.

“There’s a lot of history connected to genealogy, and for me it’s been very interesting,” she said.