HOBITS Rule!

Thank you to our volunteer HOBITS (Historical Obituary Indexers) for a great year in 2008. Thirteen dedicated volunteers spent a total of 823.1 hours adding names to our Dayton Obituary Index. Our staff members have also spent quite a few hours on this, although we did not track the number of hours that staff spent. In 2008 we completed adding names from the Dayton Daily Journal or Dayton Daily News for 1907, 1928, 1929 and 2008. We worked on, and are still working on 1906, 1908, 1930, 1931, 1934, and 1956. You can see that individual HOBITS and staff members were assigned different years to extract and enter.

In addition, we worked on an index to World War II casualties from the Miami Valley. This is not yet complete, but we have found quite a few interesting tidbits along the way by examining these clippings. For example, a number of Marines who died on Iwo Jima were from the Dayton area. Quite a number of local civilians and military personnel were Prisoners of War in the Philippines. There were a number of write-ups on nuns, priests, and Catholic missionaries who were affiliated with the University of Dayton (St. Mary’s College) who were among these POWs. One notable POW was Ruth Stoltz, a military nurse who, I am happy to report, was liberated and later taught at the Miami Valley Hospital School of Nursing. It is sobering to see how the casualties mounted as the war escalated. We are now working on 1944 and we see the local death count rise.

If you are not familiar with the Dayton Obituary Index view it at:

http://www.daytonmetrolibrary.org/HobitsForm.cfm .

When the index is complete it will cover 1850 to present day.

Obituaries listed there can be viewed on the microfilm at the main library or requested by sending citation information to: magazines@daytonmetrolibrary.org .

Obituary requests are a VERY popular service of the library and staff sent thousands of obituaries in 2008 to all over the world, in addition to the many researchers who came to our library to obtain the obituaries themselves.

If anyone is interested in being a HOBIT volunteer please contact Shawna Woodard, genealogy librarian, at 496-8653 or swoodard@daytonmetrolibrary.org


- Shawna Woodard, Genealogy Librarian
Main Library