Please Consider Donating to the Godfrey's Annual Fund

It's fall.  Here in New England, that means getting out the winter clothes, bringing in the plants, stacking the firewood.  Some of us carry on the tradition of canning and putting up preserves.

 

As I go through this yearly ritual, I am reminded of going with my grandmother to check on her root cellar, a climate controlled, secure space filled with squash, pumpkins and other root vegetables.  It was like discovering treasure.  All winter long these vegetables would stay fresh because they were chosen and cared for in a special way.

 

It occurs to me that in many ways Godfrey is like a giant "root cellar" filled with books and documents, containing treasured information, preserved to help genealogists find their roots.      

A lot of time, effort and money goes into maintaining the library and our prized collection.  Our work now requires increased technology expertise and equipment as we continue to make materials available to our remote patrons.  We are especially proud of how much we added to our Godfrey Scholar online access this year. (see below for a list)

 

Please consider making a gift to the Godfrey Annual Fund.  We receive no public funding.  We thrive on the day to day efforts of our volunteers and donations from patrons like you.  Your contribution goes directly to the care and maintenance of the library and our collection.

-Beth Mariotti, Executive Director

For information on donating the the Annual Fund please contact the library at 860-346-4375.

Content added to Godfrey Scholar over the last year

 

AGBI

All 226 volumes of the AGBI organized alphabetically by surname and Finding Aids which can be used to determine the abbreviated citations and link right to the digital books on the Scholar.    

• more than 4 million names from over 800 books from our original collection and

• more than 2 million records from the Boston Transcript weekly genealogy column

Cemeteries
157 cemeteries with 45,880 burials listed

Funeral Home Records

31,322 records from index cards and 93 volumes from five funeral homes spanning 1882-1974

Church Records

28 volumes of Connecticut church record books containing 12,195 baptisms, marriages, deaths and admissions from 1668 to 1874

Vital Records

15797 Central Connecticut vital records entries from early 1700s to 1900

Digital Books

534 total new books browsable in page viewer and searchable

139 books previously on the Scholar were converted from PDF format to the page viewer and made searchable