for my 8th or 9th attempt to send this: all of the 'stuff' you have....and this means everyone..... is so much better at the library where it will be made available to the public... the FARM is not in the position to do research for you or let you do research... they do research for application to their FARM and its educational presentations (not necessarily for your particular family group or genealogy) the FARM uses the materials that are at the library just like everyone else... (tho perhaps in a much different way) and the more you send in to the library, the more you help the FARM and others.... like your fellow listers.... absolutely, without doubt, the library IS THE MUCH BETTER PLACE for the materials... (as a little aside, the more we make use of the library and its tools for archiving, the more attention the Illinois collection group will get and the more their budget will increase which helps us all....the more they have in their pipeline of things to prepare and present, the more chance they have to petition for budget increases........as it is, they help us make copies of original documents that YOU WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO COPY and give us total access to their equipment and tools and Best of all, when we turn something over to them is is available to you within a week....their response is great!) what I have personally seen over the years is our eldership 'giving' their STUFF to the independent groups (the Farm, the park district, the mayors of all the towns in the township, the historical society) and it then DISAPPEARS into someone's personal file cabinet or desk or stack hereNthere.... never to be seen again and never even documented that it was turned over to these groups - until of course we talk to an elder and they say "Oh, i gave all my photos to soNso about 5 years ago....." and to me that means those things are lost to the rest of us. (yourself included)...... I know that up until about 5 years ago, YOU would have found a tidbit here or there of information about our township.... and hardly ANYTHING about your specific family.....there was NO real effort being made to collect and make things available...NO effort at all to interview elders who could provide insight to what your own family experienced....But now, the snowball is rollin' and growin' and i know that you all on list see that things are being made available...I know for sure, that the recent scrapbook is being used like it is the KRISPYKREME of genealogy.....but there are other Dunkin Donuts of genealogy around now too, all at the library or on hyperion..... at the library, the materials get scanned and loaded to hyperion, or booked and indexed or mounted and labeled duplicated (videos) .... (talk is that these will be made available for download via hyperion- wont THAT be nice?!) and they are AVAILABLE to everyone for FREE. all information that you relate when you send in the scanned photos, etc gets added to that contribution and made available for others to see...forever and for free and at THEIR leisure.... what's more, the library has very long hours and facilities for reproduction and best of all, pleasant research environs...... as we go more into the future, the links between families will become more and more apparent to the younger generations that will be visiting the library...in person or on the web ....naturally after they visit our list! what they will find is a collective that will far surpass most of the separate entities that now exist but which are NOT research or study environments. So the more everyone contributes to the library's collection the better....MORE MORE MORE.... As it is now, I think it can be said, that the library a-l-r-e-a-d-y surpasses the other entities which claim historical interests regarding ephemeral materials and I know there is much more scheduled to make an appearance in the next several months. Keep looking! What we need from the individual families are more and more scans of documents and photos (complete with dates/names/places). We are looking for even the most basic of visions... life on our farms...grad pictures, confirmation pictures, pictures of your barns and silos.... funeral photos, anything.... with these we can do some real studies...there is no limit, there is no photo that is 'not acceptable' for it it were, then YOU would not have it! here are some examples of why your help is needed.... like what style of barn DID our people prefer... and WHO was it that would have likely built that barn.... WAS is built in that style because the builder had a preference or the farmer's preference...... and what style of silo DID we have in our township and WHEN did they get them and how does that sit in relationship to other adjoining townships..... WHAT kind of equipment DID our people have and did they share it... even teams of horses.... What was the horse preference...light drafts? or were there some farmers who actually had heavy drafts early on.... all this can be historically recreated IF we can get copies of just about everything you have in your collections.... and clothing.... just how much clothing was made BY OUR people vs purchased... pictures - in abundance- can tell us that...... Fire photos... you might think, it is j-u-s-t a photo of a fire, but look at it, can you see the wood structures? to the trained eye, these wood beams can tell exactly what kind of barn style that building WAS.... the more pics, the better. tornado pictures, inside barn pictures... everything is a good candidate..... address books... Christmas cards...... SCRAPBOOKS, even small ones.... even documents that are written in German - yes we have people who would be able to translate these for all to see.... and, certificates, land abstracts, land grants, census, even 'passports' which will teach the other researchers about what their own families likely had but which are now lost to them..... and on top of it all... a scan on stdl.org hyperion places your treasured photo in a retrievable archive should (HEAVEN FORBID) something happens to your originals. We have some photos that we have no idea whose farm it was...but when people send in pictures to us, the more chance we have to identify that farm photo.. which until it is identified is NOT placed on hyperion...so there is an advantage to sending in material......you just might end up with a photo of your own farmplace.... of late, there was a discussion on homes... the style, the era of building.... so those photos that you might think are JUST REGULAR OL' PICTURES OF THE HOUSE are things that would be of interest... in fact, i know that there are two people in 'our group' who would be able to comment WITH AUTHORITY on the evolution of our housing - but first, first we need a good collection of material to use as facts. as i sit and create indexes for all the books and scrapbooks and minutes and ledgers and plat maps, i wonder what the 100 people on the list have in their personal collections that could be of help in the long range....to a great number of people....how many people have an old photo that dates back far enough that someone in that picture is related to someone else on the list? How will one know, if it is not shared? i cannot stress enough, the need for your help in all of this...and you can see i am kinda passionate about this, right? I look at it this way, if all 100 of the our listers, took ONE 3 hour evening per month and scanned their STUFF, created complete identifications and sent the results of that evening to the library, we would have 300 hours of research materials EACH MONTH.... and 3600 hours for a YEAR..... CAN YOU just IMAGINE the result? Krispy Kreme, fudge chocolate heaven! valentine for those that cant scan... write to me direct