The title "Livingston County" is something of an understatement. Most of the obituaries found in this collection were published in the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune and pertain to residents and former residents of Livingston County. However, since that newspaper enjoys a wide circulation in the neighboring counties of Grundy, Daviess, Caldwell, Carroll and Linn, there are many obituaries of persons in those counties as well.

The CD was the culmination of efforts of many people over more than a half century. Every step of the project was performed by unpaid volunteers. Some volunteers incurred out-of-pocket expenses up to several hundred dollars, and several contributed hundreds of hours of labor.

When he retired from teaching school, Earle Teegarden, Sr., became active in the management of the Somerville Room at the Livingston County Library, where the genealogy material is kept. He clipped the obituaries from the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune, placed them in individual envelopes, and filed them. Following the death of Mr. Teegarden in 1982, Grace Cole clipped the obits, expanding the scope of the project to include such newspapers as the Braymer Bee, Kansas City Star and St. Joseph Gazette.

Marie Dryden went to the Missouri State Archives for advice on the preservation of this collection. They suggested that we tape the clippings to paper, and they in turn would microfilm them for us. Several volunteers from the Livingston County Genealogical Society and the local DAR chapter devoted a great deal of time to preparation of the clippings for microfilming. Vivian Haas, Gladys Boehner and others helped tape the obits to paper. Gladys Boehner created an electronic index.

Later, Marie Dryden used her personal computer to scan the sheets into digitized graphics files. These files, along with an electronic index in the formats of WordPerfect and Adobe Portable Document Format, were put on a six-CD set. This phase of the project ended with obituaries published in 1989. Subsequently, obits for the years 1990 through 1996 were added, increasing the number of scanned images from 2,986 to 4,494. Juanita Firmin and Gladys Boehner taped the newspaper clippings for 1990-1996. Jim Stout reprocessed the images on the six-CD set, indexed and scanned the sheets for 1990-1996 and compressed the data. The entire collection was stored on a single CD. The combined index (1950-1996) refers to 4,183 surnames and 17,472 given names.

All proceeds from the sale of this CD went to one or more of these non-profit organizations in Livingston County:

• Abandoned Cemetery Care Association of Livingston County
  
• Livingston County Genealogical Society
  
• Grand River Historical Society and Museum
  
  

In August 2016, Jim Stout revised the html code to enable use on a computer hard drive as well as on a CD. When this data format becomes technologically obsolete it is our hope that future volunteers will convert this data to a format that will extend its availability to researchers as far into the future as possible.



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