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| The Library I grew up with. Elmhurst, Illinois |
My love
affair with libraries began in first grade, when we moved to Elmhurst, Illinois,
just west of the city of Chicago. The location of our new home made it easy for
a six-year old to enjoy the independence of a magical journey at any time. We
were only a block from the stately mansion that had been turned into the city
library. Inside the library Mrs Zimmerman was in charge of the children’s desk
where we would present her with the books we wanted to borrow and our library
card.
If you couldn’t write/print your name you had to use a parent’s card. I
think I decided at a very young age that I would love to work in a library
surrounded by all those wonderful books that could transport you to anywhere in the
world you wanted to go.
Summer story
hours were obligatory for this girl. As I grew older, I began to .explore the
different types of books at the library and about third grade I discovered the chapter
books in the form of the “Bobbsey Twins”, a series of books about a family with
two sets of twins and their adventures. Later I graduated to the Nancy Drew
mysteries. After that came the Judy Bolton series and the Hardy Boys. I was
hooked on mysteries and I still am!
As years
passed my use of the library grew and expanded to more than just borrowing mysteries.
I learned to use the card catalog to find the books that held the information I
was seeking.
My children
were introduced to the library at a very young age since it was one of the places
we could walk to. We lived in a small farming community and the library was in
a community building which also housed the Village Board meetings and a resale
shop for the VFW. For a couple of Summers, I did the story hour for the library
and later served on the library board. Even though it was a small library only
open part time, there were regulations to be followed and funds to be accounted
for. When we moved to an even smaller are, there was still a public library. This time it
was inside the grade school building. It was also part time and shared the position
of Librarian with the previous library.
Once again, I served as a member of the Library Board and learned about the
importance of circulation numbers and how they affect the funding of the library.
Moving to
Florida exposed us to a library system that hosted many branches and more hours
open than ever before. This is about when I began to work on genealogy. Being
part of a larger library system, I now had access to even more reference
materials. It was in a library that I found the books “Germans to America” a
series of volumes detailing German immigration in the 1830 to the 1870s. In
them I found that my German ancestors came to the United States from the
village of Villmar in the Hessen province of the Dutchy of Nassau. That led me
to looking at the church records for Villmar where I found a marriage record
for Georg Burbach and Catharina Caspari. The record indicated that Georg was
from Oberselters. Church records from Oberselters showed that the family had
lived there for over 100 years.
Recently, I
have been spending Sunday afternoons in the Genealogy room at our library here
in Texas and I found a book in the library about the early colonists of
Virginia which mentioned my husband’s Ferguson line which prompted me to look
for them in the Soldiers of the American Revolution books there two shelves
below. Now I am gathering evidence so my son and daughter can become members of
the SAR and DAR.
Libraries
expand my world and I don’t expect that to stop anytime soon!
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