The Fulton County Historical Society's collection of cemetery records was started in the late 1970s. Dedicated volunteers tried to visit every cemetery in Fulton County to copy on cards all the tombstones which could still be read. Secretary Glenn Cordell offered boxes of obsolete IBM punch cards which were donated for this project. Historical Society member Doris Finney of Iowa spent two winters typing the handwritten information from these cards to computer disks. The names and dates were then arranged into an alphabetical data base and placed on the Society's web page to help family researchers. As of March 2015 there were more than 22,000 names in the database.
Beginning about 1980, Historical Society librarian Hazel Harr started clipping obituaries from the Fulton County News and pasting them on these IBM file cards. Mary Black and Naomi Waite continued adding new obituaries. Bill Turner and Jim Boor photocopied obituaries from earlier newspapers and donated these to the Historical Society library. The decision was made to limit the obituaries to those people who were buried in Fulton County. With the recent increase in cremation with "burial at the convenience of the family", those obituaries are being included if one of our local funeral homes had the service.
In March of 2105 the Historical Society substantially completed the work of putting online a scan of each obituary clipping. The text of the more than 10,000 obituaries is fully searchable, providing a wealth of information for researchers. The Society continues to update this database with new scans.
This data base is the property of the Fulton County Historical Society and may not be reproduced on any other web site!
