Neighbors Helping Neighbors

PROTECTED CONTENT

If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.

Username

Password

Login

Lost your password?

Username and Password Help

Please enter your email and we will send you a password reset link.

Email

Submit

← Back

Submitted by Michelle Allensworth Pendleton and the SCHS Members for Change:  A Renewal and Preservation Group

 

Just as preservation of county history was important to the Shelby County Historical Society when the organization originally formed , the neighboring counties were on their own path to do the same.

The Lewis County Historical Society had invited five people from the Shelby County Historical Society to give a special presentation at the April 9, 1967 quarterly meeting which met at the Ewing school.  Roy Neff, Chairman of the cemetery surveycommittee from the Shelby County Historical Society; Gladys Powers, librarian of the Carnegie Library at Shelbina and a SCHS member who will be elected as SCHS Historian in October that same year; Elizabeth Powers, SCHS member and assistant librarian at the library in Shelbina; Virginia Griggs, SCHS member and Ola B. Wilson, Shelby County Clerk and Recorder and President of the Shelby County Historical Society.

The Lewis County society were very interested in conducting a cemetery survey in their own county.  The program by the Shelby Countians discussed in detail their cemetery survey workwhich took three years to complete and also included a discussion of Civil War records and files on soldiers includingthe same for other wars, presented by Elizabeth Powers.  Virginia Griggs discussed genealogical record documents and the proce dure for research to begin a family tree.

Several charts, maps, booklets and card files from their county cemetery census survey project were displayed and Roy Neff explained the chart he made on a large map of Shelby Countymarking all the cemetery locations.  Mr. Neff spoke about the organization necessary for Lewis County to do a similar project and explained how atlases and other books, especially undertaker records are great resources.   He found hunters were excellent sources for finding scattered solo graves. Within the Committee, township chairmen were appointed and many boots on the ground had the huge task of navigating overgrown brush, briars, and weeds to record neglected cemeteries and forgotten family burial grounds. 

Gladys Powers explained how the information was gathered and arranged by cemetery and burials were listed and Ola Wilson explained the process of how all the information was typed onto file cards.  Complete sets of the cemetery survey cards were sent to the State Historical Society in Columbia, the Carnegie Library and the Shelby County Historical Society.  It should be noted that a master card file of all entries in one alphabet is located in the Shelby County Courthouse.

On September 26, 1971 the Lewis County Historical Society held their 8th Annual Historical Exhibition with about 55 exhibitors.  The Lewis County exhibited for the first time theirown County cemetery records they had been compiling for all identifiable burials for the last three years and stated their workwas nearly complete.  One of the exhibits was cemetery records for Shelby County.