Author: Sam

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.

The index to the booklet put together related to the City of Creal Springs has been added to our Master Local History Index on our site. The booklet contains newspaper clippings, history articles that have been written and numerous photos of Creal Springs. Considerable information related to articles written about the Ozark Hotel and the Creal Springs College is included.

In 1964, the county held a 125 year Quasqui-centennial event in Marion and produced a souvenir program book to accompany the event. The book index has been added to our website in the Master Local History Index.

In 1939, Williamson County Illinois celebrated its 100th anniversary so a centennial celebration was organized. This souvenir program was published and sold during the centennial and contains some historical data, names and business advertisers of the year 1939. Its index has now been added to the Master Local History Index on our site.

A booklet was published in 1926 by the Herrin Lion’s Club to sway the state and national attitudes about Williamson County and Herrin due to the large number of negative ads related to the KKK, prohibition violations and gang warfare that had been appearing in national papers. The booklet was intended to point out the positive points of our county and towns therein including Herrin, Marion, Carterville and Johnston City as well as convince state Lions Clubs to hold a state convention in Herrin. The booklet is naturally focused on business, infrastructure, schools and churches. The index has been added to our Master Local History Index.