Importance of being a State OGS member

Are you a member of the State chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society? Have you visited the wonderful site that they have that provides so much valuable information to State members? The idea for this article came up recently when speaking to one of our local members and they told me how many people did not belong to the State chapter. Well it did not surprise me so much since for years I have been a member of the State chapter, but not a member of the local group. You miss out in both situations. One of the largest benefits I find to being a member of the State chapter is the excellent publications that keep me up on all things Ohio Genealogy. OGS News won an award from the National Genealogical Society for excellence in writing. I have enjoyed their Civil War and Settlers magazines as well over the years. The best part is that all three publications are going to come to us combined. This will be outstanding and provide many hours of enjoyment of learning on doing genealogy in Ohio. The second item that I find so beneficial about the membership is the access that is given on the website in the member’s only area. Having the ability to search Heritage Pursuit online is wonderful. It takes you to the many genealogical and historical books that have been published on the state of Ohio. You start out your search by identifying a name and then the geographic location of your ancestor. Since it is doing a word search and not an index search you are able to find your ancestors in publications where their names may not appear in the index. This provides an excellent way to identify source information that you can not find in other places. Did I mention that you can do this search at 2 in the morning in furry slippers with a cup of coffee as well? This is priceless. Other items that appear in the Members area are the birth index from 1940- 1998 for the state of Ohio and the Ohio marriage index. Yes, it includes Lucas County in the birth, but not in the marriage section. Realize that this is only the index and you are not able to see the actual documents. Another section that I found interesting on the site was the Civil War Center section. This is a tremendous resource for locating more information on our Ohio Civil War Ancestors. This is a strong value for our State organization and should be used by all the membership. Included in this area are the back publications of the Ohio Civil War magazine that can be read in a PDF format. Finally another area that was interesting is the OGS blog. It provides timely coverage of the various happenings within our organization. As OGS moves into the future the blog will become a much more important component to our organization. So when you are browsing for some interesting reading please check out our State website. You are sure to find some interesting reading and by all means join so you can access the member’s only area. It is well worth your genealogy journey.