Upcoming events for October

The monthly meeting of the Webster County Genealogical Society will be held at 1 p.m. on Oct. 7. Nonmembers are welcome to join us. We will be voting on our proposed slate of officers:

President: Carol Foltz
Vice president: Joan Ewing
Secretary/Treasurer: Sue Lieske

The newsletter will be mailed out after this meeting.

History presentation

Local historian Al Nelson will give a presentation on “History of the Des Moines River” on Oct. 12. We will meet in the large meeting room of the Fort Dodge Public Library from 1 to 3 p.m.

The presentation will cover some of the factors in settling this area. Maps from the 1600s up to 1850 will illustrate the prominence of the Des Moines River for hundreds of years. Some Indian treaties pertinent to our area will be discussed, along with the impact of the Des Moines River Navigation Act.

Third-quarter newsletter

Members of the Webster County Genealogical Society should have already received their newsletters.

We have had a request for the newsletters to be in digital format, so they can be emailed instead of mailed. If you would like to have your newsletter emailed, please send your request to webcoiagenies@gmailcom. Put “newsletter” in the subject line.

Here is a two-page sample of the current newsletter, so you can see what the quality is. (link ) I was working from a copy, so it’s not 100 percent. But it’s readable. I’ll work from the original next time, so the quality should be better.

In addition to the two pages in the PDF, other information in the current newsletter includes: entries from the 1889/1890 Fort Dodge city directory from Fred Everhart to Chas F. Garrison, a continuation of the Webster Count probate index case numbers 1229 to 1262, a letter to the editor from May 1923 (responding to a letter to the editor that was in the previous newsletter), and some other miscellaneous items.

It’s not likely that we will have the entire newsletter online for nonmembers to access. We will email the newsletter to members who request it.