Visit to Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence, MO

On the way back from visiting relatives at Christmas, we stopped at the Midwest Genealogy Center, a part of the Mid-Continent Public Library in Independence, Missouri.  The library had a booth at the FGS/RootsTech conference and was on the way so we planned to arrive at 6:00 PM and spend an evening seeing what was there before proceeding with the rest of our drive the next day.  We ended up spending the evening and all of the next day at the library--the collection is quite good and we both found much good material.

The library specializes in the mid-west; I found a shelf on each of the counties in Illinois and Indianna in which I'm interested.  They have all of the major online resources; I spent several hours working on newspapers that I can't access from home or our local library.  It has full sets of training DVDs from several leaders in genealogy education.  Given that we make the trek to Minnesota a couple of times a year, we will start making Independence our overnight stop and may start spending a day there to break up the drive.

If we had been paying attention, we could have signed up for a library card while we were there, as that must be done in person.