Pottsville Free Public Library Online

We pass this on via NEHGS and The Pottsville Free Public Library

Pottsville Free Public Library, Pennsylvania
by Valerie Beaudrault, NEHGS

www.pottsvillelibrary.org

The city of Pottsville, seat of Schuylkill County, is located in east central Pennsylvania. Click on the ‘GENEALOGY and local history materials and services’ link on the Free Public Library’s homepage to access the resources page.

Online resources for Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania

The Pottsville Free Public Library’s website contains links to a number of resources useful to family history researchers with Schuylkill County ancestry. A number of sites related to coal mining are listed here, as are online vital records indexes, including the Schuylkill County Courthouse Archives Marriage Record Index for the period from 1885 through 1969. Researchers will also find W. W. Munsell's History of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, published in 1881, with an every name index. It is in PDF format; you must have Adobe Acrobat Reader to view.

Church and Cemetery Records
The library has provided links to external websites with free cemetery and church records. In addition, there are databases for cemeteries in Shenandoah Heights on the library’s website. These cemetery listings were compiled and donated to the library by Andy Ulicny of Shenandoah. The files are in Microsoft Word 2003 format. If you do not have Microsoft Word 2003 or later, you will have to download a viewer to access these files.

Books
The Pottsville Free Public Library’s holdings include a number of local histories detailing information about the residents of Schuylkill County and/or the city of Pottsville. Several of them contain biographical sketches. Alphabetical indexes to eight of the local history volumes have been created and uploaded to the library’s website. Click on the title link to view the index for that title.

Census
Under the Census section there is a link to an alphabetical list of nearly every borough and village in Schuylkill County with its township. Click on the ‘this list’ link to open a new page with the file.

Newspapers
The Pottsville Free Public Library has created partial online indexes to deaths to the Pottsville Republican newspaper and the Shenandoah Evening Herald.

The library has nearly all of the issues of the Pottsville Republican on microfilm for the period from October 1884 to the present. The death index file currently contains nearly 125,000 names for the period October 1884–1894 and an obituaries-only for the period 1950–1971. The names appeared in obituaries, funeral notices, and/or inquest reports. If an entry was difficult to read the entry was marked "hard to read" and may be difficult to copy clearly.

The Library has nearly all issues of the Shenandoah Evening Herald newspaper on microfilm for the period from May 23, 1891 through 1980. The index contains more than 2,000 names and death dates and page numbers from the newspaper. The data fields in both indexes include name, date of the article and page number. Researchers may request copies of obituaries from the Reference Department via email or mail. Please note that obituary or article requests must include an exact date.