Special Collections Room

Special Collections Room-- Jackie Niemeyer

We have some great books in the special collections room at the library. A lot of hard work went into writing and indexing different county and state books in the collection. Our society has done several cemetery books of our local cemeteries such as Acacia, Pioneer, Citizens, Turlock and Ceres among others. GSSC has also done an every name index for a couple of Stanislaus County History Books. They are " The History of Stanislaus County " by George Tinkham and also " Stories of Stanislaus" by Sol P. Elias. They were both published in the 1920s and our society indexed them years later. Tinkham's book has biographical sketches and photos of prominent county men including Sol. P. Elias. Sol was a former mayor of Modesto and he wrote his book about various happenings and history of the county.

Use the indexed books in our collection as a finding aid for your genealogical documentation. One good example are the books done by Virgil D. White. He has abstracted and indexed a lot of the early wars pension and service records from the National Archives. His best-known work is " Genealogical Abstracts of Revolutionary War Pension Files". It is a 4-volume set with an every name index. It gives a good synopsis of the pension information. If you find your person in the book you can find the original papers either on line or you can order from the archives. His other books that we have are indexes for Old War Pension files, Indian Wars and the War of 1812 pensions. Come visit us at the library to use these and all the other great books we have.

I also still need volunteer help at the Special Collections room on the second and fourth Monday's of the month. We are open from 10 am to 3 pm but I would only need a couple hours of help on those Mondays. I want to especially thank Marge Schueber for her help at the library on the other Mondays. It is very much appreciated!

You can reach me at---( jackie.niemeyer@prodigy.net )