Historic Oglethorpe County’s next presentation will focus on two ancient, Native American bird-effigy mounds in Putnam County. It will be held at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27 at the Oglethorpe County Library. Everyone is invited.
Decades of obituaries are just a search away at the Oglethorpe County Library. But few people know the information is there.
The Historic Oglethorpe County Obituaries 1994-2021 project, led by Historic Oglethorpe County (HOC), is a searchable database that contains more than 6,000 obituaries from The Oglethorpe Echo from 1994 to 2021.
All issues of The Oglethorpe Echo were undigitized before its partnership with the University of Georgia in 2021. That means researchers and residents didn’t have a quick way to access them.
HOC, seeing this problem, decided to make the obits a publicly accessible resource through the archives.
“We thought, ‘What do people use?’ They want to look up relatives. They want to do genealogical research,” said Kathleen deMarrais, president of HOC. “The obituary project would be one way to pretty quickly access that."
A volunteer-based project, the work was split primarily between deMarrais, Stan Johnson, Gary Doster and Freda Williams.
Johnson, Doster and Williams were the team in the archives. The three would go through bundled papers by year, each year containing roughly 52 papers. For every year, they took apart the bundle, went through the issue’s obituary page and copied the archived data into a spreadsheet.
The volunteers say the project was relatively easy, if a little time-consuming. There were challenges, including the fragility of the older papers. But that mattered little in comparison to the outcome.
“I took a lot of satisfaction out of getting this accurately recorded, accurately listed for future researchers,” Doster said.
After the three finished going through the archives, deMarrais compiled the data into a master spreadsheet that was then shared with the Oglethorpe County Library. The database is accessible through its computers.
Each data entry includes the name, age at death, place of burial and the edition they appeared in in The Oglethorpe Echo. Users can search through the masterlist containing the over 6,000 obits or through the individual years, along with filtering by name, age at death, place of burial and the edition they appeared in.
Those accessing the database can also use it as a jumping off point for further research.
A few steps away from the computer, the sixth edition of the cemetery book, compiled by HOC, can be accessed. The book helps people quickly access the locations of the cemetery, as well as track the history of families in Oglethorpe County to ensure they remain a part of the historical record.
While the database can be useful for genealogists, historians and other researchers looking for information on the history of Oglethorpe County, the project isn’t just for them.
It can be helpful for anybody trying to find more information about their family roots and history, especially those with deep ties to Oglethorpe County.
“They grew up here. They went to church at a certain church. They have their family here, their extended family here, and this is where their roots are,” deMarrais said. “If you find one or two (connections) in this database, you might find a whole community who could tell you more about that family.”