HANCEVILLE – Through donations and purchases, Wallace State Community College is making a huge expansion of one of the area’s best resources for searching family origins. Several hundred books, documents and microfilms have been added.
The new material is broad and eclectic including books to locate German parish records, newspaper abstracts on Cullman and surrounding counties, Civil War spy reports and letters from southern federal courts in the 1800s. The library also has access to a number of websites for research.
Richard Blanton has donated more than 500 books on the American Revolution, Civil War and Old West that genealogists will find valuable. The search room, located in the basement of the college’s library, also has a new copy machine and will be placing online the college’s historical scrapbooks.
Renee Marty and Vicki Herring have joined Iman Humaideh on the staff in processing these new materials. The genealogy library in Wallace State's library is open to everyone Monday through Thursday from 7:30 am to 8:15 p.m., Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Help is available to researchers until 4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday and 2 p.m. Saturday.
Robert S. Davis, professor of history, manages the collection and every semester he offers a continuing education classes taught on successive Wednesday and Thursday nights, 5 to 8 p.m. For the remainder of this spring, he is offering advanced genealogy/book publishing March 22-23, Civil War Research April 5-6, and Southern Research April 26-27. For more information on these classes, contact mandi.perkins@wallacestate.edu or 256-352-7826.
Davis is an award-winning author who appears in television documentaries. He spoke on General John Coffee and the Cherokees at the SEASECS meeting in Montgomery; on creating archives in museums to the Alabama Museum Association at Wallace; on finding your Revolutionary War ancestor in Anniston; on writing your life story in Irondale and Mountain Brook; and on the American Revolution to the South Carolina Historical Association in Greenville, South Carolina, all recently in just over one week.
On March 26, Davis will give three lectures at the opening of the new National Museum of the American Revolution in Yorktown, Virginia. He is a member of the Birmingham and Cullman chapters of the Sons of the American Revolution.
For more information about the Wallace State Genealogy Collection, visit www.wallacestate.edu or call 256-352-8265 or toll free at 1-866-350-9722.
