Published Sunday, March 23, 2003
By Sherris Moreira-Byers
Herald Staff Writer
Next time you want to do some digging around for old roots, try the Shenango Valley Community Library in Sharon on Tuesday mornings. But don't bring a shovel.
The Mercer County Genealogical Society meets there every Tuesday and spends time going through old court records, old newspapers, and listening to old stories.
"I searched my own family history and that's how I got involved," said Loretta DeSantis of Hermitage, a longtime member of the society and the society's librarian. Many of the other members joined for the same reason.
"I just wanted to try to put my family genealogy together because my mother never told me much about my family," said Carolyn Kirby of Sharon, who's volunteered with the society for about a year. "I lost my job last year and I wanted something to do and I've always wanted to do this. The easiest, quickest way to do this is to get into it. And it's interesting to see the people who come who want to find out different things about their family. You meet a lot of new people."
What they do includes taking copies of vital statistic records from the courthouse and placing them in plastic wrappers, reading through old newspapers on microfilm and making copies of obituaries, birth records and court records, and sometimes even walking through county cemeteries.
"I've walked all the cemeteries," said Ms. DeSantis, who was involved in the publishing of the Mercer County cemetery records. "Sometimes people tell me they know of a cemetery that I've never been to, but so far, I've been to all of them. The best way to know a county is to walk it."
Past society president Paul Corbett of Sharon also combined his own personal genealogy search with his group interest, especially when he found out he is related to Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and David Bradford, who was a famous part of the post-revolutionary Whiskey Rebellion.
"When you can go back another generation, you finally get the clue that connects you to another generation," he said. "That's really exciting."
The society organizes all the information it researches and responds to about 150 requests a year -- via letter and e-mail -- from people looking for all kinds of family answers.
"One of the funniest letters we got was from a woman in Oakland, California, who said that on her father's deathbed, his last words were Sharon, Pennsylvania," said Toni Sheehan of Brookfield. "She wanted to know would we have any idea why he would say that. Unfortunately my crystal ball was out at the repair shop," she added with a laugh. "We looked up his name and found nothing."
Ms. Sheehan, who deals with the society's correspondence, said they also get a lot of mail from jails looking for information. "Convicts have lots of time on their hands," she explained.
Betty Shafer of Brookfield spends much of her time Tuesday mornings at the library looking through the microfilms of old newspapers, such as the Grove City Reporter Herald and the Mercer Western Press. They also search through old Sharon Heralds, circa 1878 to the present, except for the years during a flood in the early 1900s when all the newspapers were lost.
"I love it. It's just exciting. But the older it is, the harder it is to find in the paper," she said, referring to the print and the way papers were organized years ago. "There was no death record back then, so you have to look through the pages of each paper to find the obituaries."
According to society president Regina Donnelly of Sharon, one of the upcoming events will be the Mercer Blues 10th Pennsylvania Reserves, a Civil War re-enactors group, which will present music of the period April 17 at the library.
The society started in 1995 as a group of people interested in genealogy. It was organized under the name of Shenango Valley Club and it acquired its current name in the early 1980s, said Ms. DeSantis, who has been with the club since before the name change.
And it continues to keep the interest of the society members, as more family stories are discovered. "It's really an eye-opener and a fun hobby," Ms. DeSantis said. "It becomes an obsession after awhile."
Added Ms. Donnelly, "You need something to do after you retire. This is my after-life -- my after-retirement life," she said.
For more information, call (724) 981-4360 or check out rootsweb.com/-pamercer/PA/