2012 Summer Newsletter

GUESTS AND VOLUNTEERS This quarter there were 455 visitors to the museum from the states of Kansas, Missouri, Florida, Oklahoma, Ohio, Washington, Arkansas, South Dakota and Oregon A total of 33 volunteers worked over 1,444 hours in the museum this quarter. It should be noted that our volunteer history researchers have put in many more hours than re ported. PLEASE NOTE THAT WE DO NOT USE OUR P.O. BOX 123, ONLY OUR STREET ADDRESS. THANK YOU DISPLAY The month of April is our Civil War month. Room one has Civil war displays going all around the room. May was school month. We had school jackets, band uni forms on display. The classes that had special reunions, we had yearbook for that year on display. There were yearbooks for Paola, Osawatomie, Louisburg, Fontana, Spring Hill. In room 2 our display is on reconstruction following the Civil War. There is a layout of the county showing where each school was located in l870. We have pictures of most rural schools. June was wedding month. There were some early wedding dresses on display including a Civil War dress. The Art Guild is presenting the yearly art show. They have an article in the quarterly.. Bernice Chitwood MINIATURE ART SHOW Th e 8 th Annual International Miniature Art show opened June 23 rd at the Museum. The show drew artists from as far away as South Africa, Iran, Wales, Great Britain and Russia. Many states also were represented. The Juror was Karin Jones from the Nelson Art Gallery of Kansas City, Missouri. A Reception and the awards were June 30. (list) . The show closes July 28. Be sure to check out the boxes from Russia – Lacquer with Russian iconography and the box made from camel bone from Iran. The paintings are 25 square inches and smaller with some no larger than a postage stamp. There are ab stracts and realism represented in many different mediums. One of the members of the Art Guild will be here most of the time during the show to answer any questions. Jean Cook

LIBRARY Received in the Library are two large notebooks on gene alogy. “Water and the Word”, “Abraham Wise Genealogy” by Lucille Donaldson, Rachel Hayward and William M Caldwell, Jr” 1996. This family starts out in Germany, then to Pennsylvania, and then to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mis souri and Kansas. There is a lot of genealogy represented in these notebooks. We have new research fees for the Library. It has become necessary to help carry the load of paying the bills and it helps preserve the written records we have in our Library. These records are the originals and are not completely mi crofilmed. Many volunteers have given their time to put all this together for presentation to the public. We have tried to be in line with other research centers. For non-member walk-in researchers we ask $15.00 per hour. If you are a member it is $7.50. For e-mail or phone queries we ask $25.00 per hour (non-member) and $12.50 for a member. Color copies are $2.00 per page for non members and $1.00 per page for members. Black and white copies are .50 each for non-members and .25 for members. Copies of documents (Marriage certificates, school re cords, probate records, land records, district court records) are $5.00 per page for non-member and $2.50 for member. As you can see that we are offering quite an incentive to our members and others to become members. You have heard me report for many years about the prog ress we were making on the District Court records. Many of our volunteers have worked on this. These records finally got entered on the computer, then we had to proof read it all. And now, believe it or not, we have them in an index form so we can find the records by name. Up to now they were known only by case number. We thank the many vol unteers who worked on this project. In particular, we thank Louis Reed for setting up the program so we could enter all the information and also to Louis for his help in the finish work. He is also helping us to get the index ready to put “on line”. This ought to be ready in a short time. Look for it on our web page. We hope to get ready other indexes to put “on line”. We have taken some of our “out of date” books from the Genealogy section off the shelves and have them up in the Gift Shop for sale. We have two full shelves of family gene alogies that have been given to the library and we thank the authors very much; these are valuable books. We will be doing more to streamline our research capabili ties in the future. Betty Bendorf, Librarian

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