THE STODDARD PROJECT

The Stoddard Project is an inventory of all materials in DuPage County repositories that would be useful in genealogical and historical research of DuPage county people and places. There are two separate parts to the project, the first is a listing of the reference works and the individual libraries that house them and the second is an index to many of the individual works. The materials are as diverse as histories of the county and of individual towns, high school yearbooks, histories of individual churches, maps and plats, old city directories and telephone books, holdings of back issues of local newspapers, etc. The inventory does NOT include "how to do genealogy" books, genealogical works having no DuPage County connection (Vital Records of Connecticut towns, for example), biographies of famous people having no connection to DuPage County, etc., even though they are housed in DuPage County repositories. The repositories include, but are not limited to, public and college libraries and historical societies in DuPage County and a few located nearby that have significant DuPage County resources, Newberry Library in Chicago, Allen County Public Library in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. and in Elgin, Illinois.

References listed for the Naperville Branch of the Family History Center include ONLY works permanently held at the branch library and do NOT include items that could be obtained from their main library in Salt Lake City.

The inventories of the various repositories are being completed by volunteers of DCGS and will be added to the web site as they are submitted. As of this date, about one half of the repositories have been assigned. No repository inventory should be considered complete because either the volunteer is still working on it or because additional works are continually being found at or acquired by the various facilities.

The Stoddard Project is an outgrowth of the life work of DCGS member John Stoddard. John visited every repository in DuPage County as well as others in order to determine what materials were available for researching DuPage people. He then published DuPage County, Illinois, Genealogical Records Located in DuPage County Repositories in 1992. This project is an update of his publication. He also indexed some of the books and made copies of indexes made by the authors or others. The second portion of the project includes these indexes. Additional indexes will be included as the project proceeds.

If you wish to volunteer to inventory a repository (Many library catalogs are online, so the collection can be inventoried from anywhere.), transcribe