So many people are offering to help type and post information online, here is a way to help that many of us had not thought about. Hats off to Lori for thinking of a very important way to help fellow researchers. Nancy Watrous FIWATROUS@aol.com ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The following email was posted to the Cook County, IL Mail List. This lady is to be commended for what she has done to help all of us in our research. If each and everyone of us would do what she has done, in her own parish, our searching would be a lot easier. Please do not contact me! I am only forwarding her email. Her address is at the end of her posting. ______________________________ Hello List: I m relatively new to the list, just a few months. I would like to share a recent experience involving some volunteer work which resulted in a wealth of information which can be used by many future researchers. In the last few days there have been some postings highlighting the problem of family information hidden in church documents, frequently unnoticed until a persistent family investigator takes the time to root it out. Recently I had a similar experience. I scheduled a visit with the parish priest in the neighborhood where my immigrant grandparents married and raised their family. I gave the priest one of the surnames I was researching and a week later we met for close to 3 hours pouring over the baptismal and marriage registers. Prior to my arrival he had looked through a church Jubilee book from 1923 which was a pretty thorough history of the founding of the church. He had identified one reference to the surname I was researching and during this time we found a second reference to the other side of the family. I was very taken with the book and a few months later I asked the priest if I could scan in the entire 200 page volume. He thought I was nuts for wanting to do this but was good natured about it. I spent 2 days at the rectory with my PC and scanner. There were over 100 pages dedicated to family portraits and biographies many including the year the person or family came to America and where they had lived before settling in Chicago. There were also many pages of business advertisements giving additional information about how they earned their living. With the priest's permission the entire volume has been sent to a Genealogical Society. It has a website containing all the names indexed from many other church jubilee books, all done by volunteers. I took extra time to index "my" jubilee book. The end result was 31 pages of names (hundreds of them) and not 2 but 18 references to my family members (plus school pictures of aunts and uncles which would never have been identified otherwise). Once posted, other family historians will have an opportunity to read about and see their ancestors as well. In the next few months these names will be posted added to the SGS (Slovene) section of the www.feefhs.org website. The church is benefiting also. I am leaving a complete volume of the book / name index. This will keep the fragile original from incurring more damage plus help the church secretary with future inquiries. All she has to do is turn to the index to see if the family is mentioned, then turn to the pages and head for the copy machine. Maybe some of our other Cook genealogists might consider approaching the Cook County churches important to their family histories and volunteer to copy one of their Jubilee books and offering to index its names. Think of how much information there is sitting on shelves because the church office staff do not have the time to spend on our requests. Being able to do this was easier than I thought. Maybe volunteering to do the grunt work is all it would take to get a lot more information out into the open. Maybe if enough volunteers did this we would have something valuable to share with the rest of the listmembers. So, if anyone has been researching ancestors from St. Stephen church in Chicago and coming up empty you can e-mail me privately with your inquiry. The index has many names but not all names of everyone who worshipped there. Lori Aulo00@aol.com