I know this won't help the person searching for her uncle's WWI records, but
here's a thought for all of us, since we all need some kind soul to help us
out with volunteer obit lookups. If you ever have been helped, and are
looking for a practical way to say "thank you" for all those who've extended
your research reach, consider volunteering to enter obits at one of several
web resources for that purpose. That way, you'll be adding to a resource
that will help all of us more as it grows.
I started "indexing" obits for the Obituary Daily Times after an incredible
effort by a monumentally kind soul up in the northern reaches of Michigan to
help me obtain an obit that just didn't want to be found! I live in CA. I
have only once been to MI, and I can tell you, it wasn't to the far reaches
of the northern part of the state. I was looking for an obit of a man who
lived all his adult life in Ft Wayne, IN, but for some reason didn't have
his obit printed there in the easily accessible newspaper archives. However,
I found out he was from Iron River MI, and hoping for a small town flavor to
their newspaper, tried to get a copy of the obit. There was one, alright,
but for some reason, the library didn't even archive their own newspaper,
and the newspaper office had lost its only copy of the volume that contained
their archives for that issue. An Obituary Daily Times volunteer, the one
who had originally indexed it, crawled through dusty storage in the basement
of the Historical Society there to find a different resource for the
archives and sent me the obit...and I was right in my hunch, rewarded with a
wonderful, newsy hometown-feel obit.
Not that I intend to reciprocate the
crawling-around-in-dusty-museum-basements aspect, but that convinced me to
become a volunteer myself, and index obits. I strongly recommend anyone who
is interested in "giving back" for all the kind help you've received in your
gen research to consider doing the same. The Obit Daily Times has a simple
process, and it really only takes me a few minutes a day to input the data,
since I am working on a small town newspaper (I guess I couldn't guarantee
"a few minutes" for the NY Times!).
You've probably seen the ODT on the rootsweb site, yourself. If not, check
out
http://www.rootsweb.com/~obituary/ and see if it is something you could
volunteer to do, too. I heartily recommend it!
Jacqi
researching BROWN, CARLE, and RIESBERGER in Cass Co