Thursday, July 17, 2008

"Quite a Revelation" - SDGS "Lost Treasures" work

The San Diego Genealogical Society's "Lost Treasures Committee" was featured in an excellent newspaper article today titled "Quite a Revelation" by Liz Neely in the San Diego Union-Tribune. The article is online here (for how long I don't know - I have captured it in a file).

The article starts:

"The Britton-Moon family Bible is weathered and full of links to the past. Locks of hair and a letter penned but never sent are slipped between brown and brittle pages.

"The Bible, printed in Philadelphia in 1887, and others like it present an irresistible challenge to the San Diego Genealogical Society, which is trying to reunite old family Bibles with living descendants."


and later in the article:

"The committee formed three months ago to match 30 Bibles and other heirlooms to living descendants. The Bibles were recovered from San Diego's Family History Center or the county's Public Administrator, said Marna Clemons, the society's president. So far, the society has scanned the family pages from eight Bibles, and published them in their quarterly journal and online."

Please read the whole article - it is well worth the effort.

Here are photos of the newspaper article on pages B1 and B8 of the Our Region section and a picture of the Bible on page A2 of the Main section of the newspaper.






This is a wonderful article about a real labor of love, one of the real blessings of doing genealogy research. The recipients received a priceless treasure, and the society gets recognition for a job well done. Congratulations to SDGS for some excellent work and the publicity.

The writer of the article contacted me yesterday to inquire if CVGS has a similar effort. I told her that we didn't have any Bibles, but we did have two estate paper collections that we were itemizing. I mentioned www.RootsTelevision.com and the Unclaimed Persons effort to her also.

I thought that it was interesting that SDGS obtained the Bibles from the Family History Center and the County Public Administrator's office. I hadn't thought about the PA office before - that's a potential resource for items like this.

Does your local genealogy society have a lost treasures or estate papers committee working on items like this? Work like this is a way to keep society members active and challenged, and perform a worthwhile public service.

1 comment:

gsgenealogy said...

Hi Randy,
As a member of the Lost Treasures Committee, Thanks for your kind words! We are also placing photos like the 120 Banta/Simmons/Wyatt photos I sent to Sonoma State University this week and miscell. documents. I am trying to update our website but its not cooperating. I will post our Lost Treasures blog and include documents types and surnames.