I got the coolest email yesterday!
It all started five days ago. I was working on tying up some loose ends on a cousin, Eva F Evans. She died at just 25 years of age. She had at least 5 children – 4 were living at the time of her death. I was trying to sort out one of her daughters, Goldia – Golden – Goldie (you pick, every record so far has been different). I came across something. I don’t remember what. That something led me to a free Obituary Service offered by the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. I gave it a try and four day – FOUR DAYS – later I had the two images shown above. Super cool!
The email I received contained this info:
The Toledo-Lucas County Public Library does not charge for copies of obituaries. Your obituary is attached to this email. Please continue to limit your requests to a maximum of three obits at a time.
If you wish to ask for more obituaries, please go to this link to search for and request them: http://www.toledolibrary.org/obits/.
If you wish assistance with genealogical questions other than obituaries, please email your request to lhisref@toledolibrary.org.
I was so impressed with their quick turn around time! So, if you need an obit for the Toledo, Ohio area, give this a shot. And if you ask about assistance with other genealogical questions, let me know how it goes. Wouldn’t it be so great if every library had the resources to offer this kind of service?
Ahh, back in the day…Librarians were our “Google.” Fast, friendly, free and rarely stumped! Wish those days were back 🙂
Humans with expertise are really irreplaceable. Once upon a time I was a librarian while I was a college student. I loved that job!
Amberly,
I want to let you know that your blog post is listed in today’s Fab Finds post at http://janasgenealogyandfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2015/05/follow-friday-fab-finds-for-may-22-2015.html
Have a great weekend!
Thank you Jana!
I love Ohio’s whole library system, and the Rutherford B. Hayes Library obituary index. I have gotten lots of good stuff. Only had one problem so far with a library not being able to find a newspaper that matched the index.
After this experience it made me wish I had more family in Ohio. I only have a few individuals in collateral lines in Ohio and only for short periods of times. I’m glad to hear their whole system is great!
My family is similar. Most of my lines passed through briefly in the mid 19th century. I try to get as much as I can though the Ohio lines though. If you join the Rutherford B. Hayes presidential library, you have access to Newpaper Archive as part of the membership. It’s a super deal!
Good tip! I’ll keep that in mind when I’m helping people. I have access to Newspaper Archive through MyHeritage and it’s free to use at the FamilySearch Center I volunteer at. Newspaper Archive is so difficult to search effectively – do you have any good tips?
My biggest tip would be to search pages directly if you think something should there, like an obituary. I found several obits that way. The OCR text doesn’t work as well on some of the older papers when the text is fuzzy
Thanks for the tips. I wish their search features were better. I feel like it’s always a bit of a fight to get it to understand what I’m searching for. And it’s not like I don’t have loads of experience searching on tons of different websites… 😉
I agree! I wish they would allow searches for first names only, without a surname. I have ways of working around it but it gets frustrating at times.