Berks County Genealogical Society

The Society undertakes a variety of projects which require many volunteers. Past projects have included indexing county atlases, abstracting marriage and death notices, and indexing census and tax lists.

Members are needed to volunteer to translate, type, and index church and ministerial records as well as various other organizational jobs such as mailing, photocopying, etc... Guy Bierman is currently overseeing this worthy project and will be happy to answer any questions you may have.

Family Group Sheet Project

"Surveying what other genealogical societies have been doing, we came upon the idea of a FAMILY GROUP SHEET PROJECT. In such a project members would submit family group sheets on their ancestors (or other families if they so desired) which would be arranged by the Society and made available to researchers. The sheets would be indexed by both the fathers’ and the mothers’ names. To obtain copies of family group sheets which pertained to his or her family, the member would send a request to the Society. Copies would be sent directly to the person requesting the material; there would be a small charge to cover the cost of photocopying. On each family group sheet there would be a space available to list the source of the genealogical data. On each family group sheet there would be the compiler’s name and address in case the compiler wanted to have the researchers contact him concerning that family. However, family group sheets should be submitted without indicating any address if you did not want to correspond, but still wanted the information to be permanently available to others. If you know that you will never have the time to produce your family’s history in book form, this would be a way to have your family group sheets preserved for future generations. An index to the family group sheets could be produced and distributed to members. Periodically the sheets could be microfilmed and the whole collection made available."

The above article appeared in our Branches of Berks nearly over 20 years ago. The project continues. As promised we did film the pages onto two rolls of film. There were a total of 3,900 at that time. These films are available through our Ways and Means Department. The films are also available through the Lending Program and are available to view at the Library. Pat Weirer began the initial indexing go the project. Sylvia Graybill was the projects first coordinator followed by Barbara Campbell, Pauline Leffel, and Guy Bierman, our current coordinator. Today there are nearly 9,000 group sheets in the system. All new members receive the index for this Project which is updated as material is received.  If you are interested in learning if your surname is in this collection use the form below to see.  For a quick check, you can use our new online search capability!