By LAURIE VOSS
Circulation Supervisor, Warsaw Community Public Library

Everyone has a passion in their lives. With some it’s gardening, maybe reading, crafting, or something totally different. For many it’s cemeteries and genealogy. People interested in genealogy can easily spend hours on genealogy and researching cemeteries.

I am so happy that I recently found that our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln is a third cousin, six times removed. I always knew he was intertwined with some distant family members, but to be family is priceless to me.

Have you used some of the resources available at the library to help in your search? WCPL has Ancestry.com available for our patrons to use free of charge, and on our website you will find many links to websites with genealogy assistance. A new resource is actually from the Allen County Public Library. They have been digitizing old books, and placing the links online. If you don’t have a computer at home, you can always use ours to access their site.

A great site right here in our county is the Kosciusko County GIS project. For the past eight years the project has been involved with photographing gravestones, which are being placed online, along with the GPS coordinates for you to locate them. Their link is: www.kcgov.com. Their next possible project is adding scanned obituaries to the site.

Another resource that the library has are the books compiled by Lester Binnie, which were done in the mid 1970’s. At that time, he walked each cemetery in the county, transcribing the graves and putting them in section and row order.

A third resource that many find helpful is the new book “How Our Ancestors Died.” It chronicles the diseases and wars throughout history and the eras in which they occurred.

Also, if you haven’t visited the Warsaw Community Public Library in the past few months, you haven’t seen our new microfilm readers. We are talking state of the art awesome.

We can look up obituaries and news articles for patrons and mail or email them out. Currently this is done free of charge as a genealogy service for our patrons.

Stop in at the Warsaw Community Public Library and check out our numerous resources, both in print and online. If we can be of service to you, please don’t hesitate to ask. If genealogy is a passion of yours, we have the resources to help.