Author: Sam

For decades, the Williamson County Historical Society has been trying to locate photographs of past Williamson County sheriffs and over the years the list has been narrowed down to the following names. If you are related to one of the counties past sheriffs listed below, look through your family photo albums and see if you can help us find photos of these individuals. Photos can be emailed to wchsmail@yahoo.com

Since there is little published about the village of Pittsburg, Illinois other than historical notations, we were pleased when Jane Whitehead, granddaughter of James T. Fowler, approached us with a couple of Justice of the Peace Docket books to copy. Fowler resided over local city skirmishes in Pittsburg while serving as Justice of the Peace of the village for at least a couple of decades. Most of the cases involved assault, theft, bad debts, public drunkenness or domestic abuse. Included along with the Justice of the Peace dockets were entries of Chattel Mortgages where those looking to borrow money from someone would officially establish collateral for the loan, usually in the form of livestock or personal property. (more…)

The last book in the Paisley Scrapbook series has been indexed and the index has been added to our Master Newspaper Index on our website. These volumes are related to the two trials held in late 1922 and early 1923 centered around the Herrin Massacre. They contain information related to the questioning of dozens of potential jurors and witnesses for the trial and reveal familial relationships, residential and occupational information of dozens of local residents. The index includes over 1,000 references.

Oldham Paisley and his father, W.O. Paisley, owned and operated the Marion Daily Republican from 1915 until it was sold in the 1970’s. During the 1920’s, Oldham covered all of the major events of the county as a reporter including the KKK, kidnapping and murder, gang members, gang warfare and the Herrin Massacre. Paisley collected all of his news clippings related to these events and grouped them. The historical society put these into book form to make them available to the public.

The entire series is as follows:

• Volume 1, 1922-24, Before & After Herrin Massacre
• Volume 2 & 3, 1922-23, First & Second Herrin Massacre Trials
• Volume 1A & 1B, 1922, Herrin Massacre
• Volume 4A & 4B, 1923-24, Ku Klux Klan
• Volume 5 & 6, 1924-26, Klan, Glenn Young, Charles Birger
• Volume 7 & 8, 1927-28, Charles Birger & Trial
• Volume 9, 1928-29, Birger, Boswell, Ritter

If you grew up in Williamson County and have ancestors from here you would probably be hard pressed to find a relative who wasn’t involved in some way to the coal mining industry. The production of coal dominated the economy of Williamson County for about 100 years.

Each year since around 1881, the Illinois Department of Mines and Minerals has produced an annual coal report. These reports are in bound hardback book form and will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the local coal industry, but also contain some interesting information. Broken down by district and county, you can find all sorts of information on local mines including fatal and non-fatal accidents by the miner’s names and how the accidents occurred.

Our society maintains a series of these reports and we have most all reports from 1900 through 1978. If you have an ancestor who perished or was damaged in a coal mine accident this would be the place to look for further information. I have attached a few sample pages from the 1917 report.

Marion High School Sophomore, Ryhan Fox, was looking for extra school volunteer credits over the summer and decided to spend his time working at the Williamson County Historical Society. Ryhan, is the son of Bobbie and David Fox and lives at the Lake of Egypt. He said that he had toured the museum while in the fifth grade at Washington School, enjoyed it, and wanted to donate his time here. Ryhan is a member of the Marion High School Varsity football team and has racked up 75 hours of volunteer time over the summer, helping advance the renovation of one of the display jail cells in the museum.

Our society over the past year has published two volumes of funeral home records for the Ozment Funeral Home that operated here in Marion covering the years 1914-1945. Before becoming Mitchell Funeral Home, the business became Ozment-Mitchell Funeral Home and we recently published two more volumes covering the years 1945-1962 for the business in Volumes 3 and 4. The indexes have been added to our Master Funeral Home Index on our website and the books are available for research at our library. Copies can also be purchased for $35 per volume while they are available.

We will be holding a membership meeting here at the museum on Sunday, July 15^th, 2018, at 2:00 P.M.  We will be discussing society business as well as completed, ongoing and future projects as well as showcasing our newly remodeled Native American room.  If you have a show & tell item, feel free to bring it. The program will be presented by Mike McNerny who will be speaking about discoveries made in his latest book related to unusual tombstone markers.

We look forward to seeing you at the meeting and want to remind you that we are continually adding resources to our website at www.wcihs.org which have now exceeded 500,000 references online.

We have added a list of all of our newspaper archives and microfilm inventory to our website. We offer several decades of the Marion Daily Republican and Johnston City Progress archives and approximately 120 microfilms. Links to these resources can be found on our Library Resources Page

With the latest addition of the Creal Springs book, our website now contains over 410,000 index references from 175 of our most referenced books available online. When added to 97,000 court case references, we now offer over half a million references available to the public on our website.

Access our records by clicking on the Records tab on any page.