West Central Missouri Genealogical Society and Library, Inc.

CANCELLED - The executive board has decided, as a precaution for the safety of all, to cancel our meeting scheduled for September 28, 2020. Be safe and keep researching.

Paula writes: I am searching for the parents of Carrie Estelle Deuel, born in Nashville, Barton County on 22 Sep 1888. I am told that her father was William Allen Deuel and her mother was Alice Robb Deuel, who died of cholera in 1888. I would appreciate any help! If you have information for Paula, please comment below.

August, 2020, meeting CANCELLED due to Covid-19 concerns.

The Executive Board of West Central Missouri Genealogy Society & Library is cancelling the July 27, 2020 meeting. Due to COVID-19 the Board made this decision to avoid any health concerns/problems for our membership and presenters. Since Johnson County has been re-opening businesses the number of COVID-19 cases has started to climb again. We will reconvene meetings when the Board feels it is safe for our membership.

Dealing with Covid-19 got you down? Me, too. So, I was thinking. Someday, our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read about this difficult time in a paragraph in a history book. They will, no doubt, read of the magnitude of case numbers and number of deaths and how this spread around the world, but will they know the stories of how individual folks were affected how our lives have been turned upside down? If not for my grandmother’s stories of the Influenza Pandemic... of the early twentieth century, my knowledge of that pandemic might also be reduced to impersonal numbers. Instead, I have heard her sorrow, as she talked of being eight years old, when her playmates began to succumb to the plague. I have heard her tell how her recently-widowed mother took her in tow as she helped tend to the sick and dying. I learned to sew (as did my grandmother and mother) at the same Singer treadle machine that Great-grandma Rosie Jane used to sew shrouds from her petticoats to bury her neighbors’ children, until she had only one petticoat remaining. When I go to visit the graves of my ancestors buried in the old Ash Hill Cemetery in Butler County, Missouri, I stand silently at the foot of the blank hillside between where Great-grandpa Frank Miller and Great-grandma Rosie Jane are buried. There are no markers in that section of the cemetery, but many are buried there. Grandma Sweetie told me that families would sneak into the cemetery late at night to bury those who had died of the flu that day, without funerals or records of their burial. I rarely remember the number of people who died worldwide, or even in that small community in Southeast Missouri, but I will never forget the poignancy of their pain. So, my challenge to you is this: take time to write, for your descendants, how covid-19 has affected you, how it has changed your normal. If you’d like, share it with us here in the comments or email to [email protected] along with permission to publish here on our webpage. Remember that our today is tomorrow’s history. See more

The Executive Board of West-Central Missouri Genealogy Society & Library is cancelling the June 22, 2020, meeting. Due to Covid-19, the Board made this decision of social distancing to avoid any health concerns/problems for our membership and presenters. Hopefully, we will be able to meet in July, 2020. An announcement of the next meeting will be made on this Page and on our website.