Williamson County Illinois Historical Society

The index to the Williamson County Illinois Sesquicentennial History book has been added to the Library Resource Index. The book was published in the years following the 1989 Sesquicentennial event celebrating Williamson County’s 150^th Anniversary. The index addition references 6,847 new Items including individual names, historic references, places, businesses, schools, organization, churches, crime and more. The index now contains 76,522 references and covers app. 37 books. The book is available for sale at the Williamson County Museum.

The index can be found under the Records Tab from any page, then select:

                                                    Library Resource Index

For the past few months, we have been working on a master reference index that will undoubtedly take years to finish. The intent is to index information found in in the genealogy library of the museum like audited cemetery books, local history books, etc. so that references to individuals, businesses, schools, organizations or city and county government can be referenced from a master index. The index is not necessarily intended to give you the information you need, but does yield some data, and will indicate whether the information can be found and where, if any. So far, we have 33 cemetery books, the Marion city cemeteries, and one local history book in the index and it’s just short of 70,000 entries. This index should help researchers not living in town with access to the museum resolve whether we might have information on an ancestor, shorten search time for volunteers and help make our books last longer.

It’s interesting to note that the one local history book (1905 Historical Souvenir) included in this index yielded app. 3,600 references and loads of genealogical and local business data. Keep in mind, common misspellings of last names, name changes over time and the time periods involved.

Anyone with free time who can volunteer to help get more of our books indexed please contact us.

Since this index was done in Excel spreadsheet and will change reasonably often, I am leaving it in spreadsheet form. Clicking the link will take you to Microsoft’s Excel online spreadsheet reader. There are scroll bars to help you navigate the lengthy spreadsheet and you will find a “FIND” function when you click the three horizontal dots in the upper right header. You can also download it and run it under Excel on your own computer. References to the Marion City Cemetery will link you to the Marion City Cemetery search page. Thanks to Marion’s IT guy, Terence Henry for exporting the data for us.

Have fun searching and leave a message if you like it or discover a glitch. You might also thank Helen Sutt Lind or Charla Murphy and others for tromping around in the weeds gathering loads of cemetery information over the years.

The link can be found under the Records tab on any page and is called:

Library Reference Index

Williamson County Historical Society president, Sam Lattuca, spoke to the Christian Women’s Fellowship of the First Christian Church on Tuesday, February 7^th, 2017. Lattuca covered the early French exploration and formation of the county and chain of title leading up to the formation of the county in 1839. He also addressed early surveying of the city of Marion and gave numerous details of the early families which formed the foundation of the early Christian Church in Marion.