Preserving Our Past

By FDL Trustee and Genealogy Expert,
Marlynn Starring

If you haven't visited the Fennville District Library Research Room lately you will be surprised at all the wonderful information on our shelves.

We are bursting at the seams with old and new things about Fennville, surrounding townships, and genealogy. It would be worth your time to just take a peek. The out-of-town visitors are amazed at all the good information they can find there and always compliment us on our collection.

Our large file cabinet has microfilm of most of the Fennville Herald issues plus one drawer has folders for the many old and new businesses which have come and gone in our City of Fennville, including the townships.

We have many, many 3x5 cards with local obituaries. Folks from all over the U.S. have visited us and located their ancestors who have lived here all their lives or just stayed for a few years. The volumes of First Land Owners in Allegan County and surrounding counties are a wonderful set of books. To accompany those we also have the 1864, 1873, 1895 and 1913 Allegan County Land Atlas and indexes to go with each book. We also have all of the Michigan Pioneer volumes with an index.

The genealogies, family histories and lineages are too numerous to list here. Some of these works are large and some are small but all have information beneficial to a researcher looking for that family. Frequently someone brings us a story or copies of their own family history. The word is out that we are striving to gather all our area's old and new family information. Many pioneer families are represented here. One could spend days in the room just reliving the trials and tribulations those old pioneer families relate to us through their stories of the "good old days."

We have all of Kit Lane's books which many people are looking for, and May Heath's book "Early Memories of Saugatuck." Jeanne Hallgren's books about the Pancake Festival in Glenn and her new book about Ganges rests on our shelf. There are seven very large notebooks with cemetery inscriptions for most of the area cemeteries and also a book listing all of the cemeteries in Michigan. We have all of the Fennville High School Annuals, even the very early ones. Many people come just to look at these books.

I could go on and on about the photos and other things, but you must see for yourself. Our library staff is more than willing to help anyone use the research room or the patron computers where we have online access to Ancestry Library Edition (in library use only). We also have copies of lineage forms available for your use. Appointments for additional help can be made through the library staff. Happy Hunting!