Today we took the opportunity to explore a local St. Louis genealogical resource that has been around for decades, but is perhaps not well known. The Missouri History Museum is of course a landmark in Forest Park as well as a popular tourist attraction for out-of-towners. The Missouri Historical Society operates it and a sister museum downtown called Soldier’s Memorial, which also attracts a lot of visitors. But did you know that the MHS has a third facility? The Library and Research Center on Skinker Boulevard has been operating since the 1980s and has an outstanding collection that is available to search online. But if you go in person, you have access to the research staff as well as free photocopies of the materials.
The building housing the library has quite a bit of history in its own right: it was originally constructed in 1927 by the United Hebrew Congregation to be the first synagogue west of the Mississippi. In 1960, the sanctuary (what is now the reading room) hosted Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was invited by the Liberal Forum to give a speech entitled “The Future of Integration.”
Because today was our first visit, we didn’t have a set agenda, and just started searching for different family members. We found a couple of new resources including a copy of Who’s Who in North St. Louis from 1925 that included an entry about Charles Martin Burmeister (and his brother William) and the Texaco station that he built. We also found their collection of City Directories (essentially the White Pages of their day) a useful way to confirm where some of our ancestors lived in St. Louis in the late 1800s.We only scratched the surface during our brief visit, so we will definitely return at a later date and report our findings here.
