Your heritage might be among the attractions

Where did I come from? Who are my people? What are my roots?
The need to know your history is strong whether your family came to this continent millennia ago or you arrived last week.
Here we offer a sampling of Nebraska and Iowa ethnic museums that may give you insight.
To read the rest of the story from the Omaha World Herald: [click here]

Wayne and Cass County Marriages

Two new web sites containing marriage information for Wayne county and Cass county, Nebraska, will be up and running in the next few days. As with the other sites sponsored by GOGS, these sites will be a work in progress, with more information added to them on a frequent basis. If you have ancestors who were married in either of these two counties, check each site occasionally, as new information may have been added since your last visit.

“Omaha Births” Website Premieres

First, there was Omaha Obits. Then came Omaha Marriages. Now, comes Omaha Births, featuring births from Douglas County, NE, records and old Omaha newspapers. The birth information is pulled from newspapers as we extract obits for our OmahaObits web site.  In many instances, there is no indication what the person’s name was going to be, but it is one way of locating the possibility of a child that may have been born and died between census records.  In some instances, the names are taken from early Omaha birth certificates collected prior to 1910 when it became state mandated to collect such information.  Registration of births in that time period was not mandatory.

The new site was activated on Sunday, March 22, 2009, which means that it currently sports the smallest number of listings–just over 1,300–of the three sites. As the number of listings grows, however, we expect the site to become as popular as the first two.

NARA “Request Pertaining to Military Records” form

NARA standard form 180, “Request Pertaining to Military Records”, is available for downloading on this site. Go to the blue download box in the right-hand side bar.

Colorful “Omaha Newspapers” Chart

Now Available for Download

Society member Karen Tippets, whose microfilm extraction work is responsible for most of the almost 120,000 listings that appear on the Omaha Obits  web site, has put together and made available for download, a colorful ”Omaha Newspapers” chart. This horizontal bar chart is in PDF format, and lists all 48 newspapers that have been published in Omaha since 1852 to the present. The chart also shows the years that each of the 48 papers were in publication. (Trivia: Omaha’s first newspaper, the “Western Bugle”, was in business from 1852 to 1853.)

To download this chart, go to the blue download box at the bottom of the sidebar on this page.

New Addition to Omaha Obits site

Thanks to society member Mike Warne, the Omaha Obits site has a new feature: Omaha Funeral Homes. This listing covers every funeral home in Omaha from 1866 to the present. This list shows Firm Name, Address, From-To (years of business), and Former Firm Name (if any).  Omaha was officially incorporated by the state legislature on February 2, 1857, and the first funeral home made its appearance 9 years after that.