ROOTS & BRANCHES

In the quarter century that I’ve been involved in the larger genealogical community, I’ve been exposed to a lot of organizations and repositories.

I try to keep my criticisms muted (or at least constructive) when I see a group going awry, and I can be an unabashed cheerleader when see an outfit that’s lifting more than its weight.

When it comes to Blair County Genealogical Society in Hollidaysburg, if there was recognition for such “weightlifting,” the group would get the superheavyweight gold medal!

I’ve often referred to it as the largest genealogy repository between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh—others say it’s the largest county repository in the commonwealth aside from Reading’s Berks History Center—but regardless of where those “bragging rights” come down, the fact is that Blair County Genealogical has 10,300 square feet of space, including more than 6,000 feet of bookshelves and 4,000 rolls of microfilm.

It’s the home of the old Floyd Hoenstine Rental Library (which dinosaurs such as myself occasionally used for hard-to-find books before the internet!) and the genealogical society has also become the custodian of many of the older actual county records.

A unique resource the society offers is its online obituary index with more than 700,000 names from throughout central Pennsylvania. Also on its website is the long-needed beginning of a catalog to the library’s extensive holdings. “It’s just been installed and not complete but has 22,750 listings that are searchable by title and author at the present time,” said Jim Snyder Jr., president of Blair Genealogical.

The society’s library also doubles as space for its monthly programs, which feature a variety of local, regional, and nationally known speakers. It has also produced many useful publications on the people of Blair County and even has a lineage society that’s aptly named the “First Families of Blair County” that is open to anyone who can prove he or she is a direct descendant of an 1846 resident of the area now known as Blair County.

The society has a variety of scanners as well as the up-to-date Scan Pro for microfilm. “Future plans include an oversized book scanner, plus digitizing local newspaper microfilm not found online,” Snyder said.

All in all, Blair County Genealogical Society is a real model for other organizations to aspire, if not on the county level, perhaps regionally throughout the commonwealth, certainly in terms of their library and perhaps even for programming (while the shift to webinars or hybrid formats that some groups have made has helped open the doors to a greater variety of speakers, filling program spots can still be a drudgery!).

 The Blair County Genealogical Society library is currently open Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Hours can be found either on its website at the URL, https://bcgslibrary.org, or Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/bcgslibrary