Funeral Programs Project

October 10, 2009

Middle Peninsula African-American Genealogical and Historical Society (MPAAGHS) announces the creation of the Middle Peninsula/Northern Neck Funeral Programs Project. Funeral programs are important historical documents in that they provide a wealth of information about the lives of the deceased. The extensive information provided may include birth and death dates, names of parents, children, and other relatives, education, work history, and church and organization affiliation. Each program is a mini-history that should be preserved and made available to family historians and other researchers. Recognizing the value of funeral programs, particularly to the African-American community, MPAAGHS has partnered with the Virginia Historical Society and FamilySearch in a project that will collect, copy, and index African-American funeral programs from Middle Peninsula and Northern Neck Virginia. After the copying and indexing have been done, the programs will eventually be made available for library and Internet research.

All persons who have collections of funeral programs are invited to lend their programs to the project. The programs will be copied and returned, and will not be harmed in any way by the copying process. However, if persons wish to donate original programs, MPAAGHS would be happy to receive them. The project will also include family letters which are documents that were often used prior to the time of printed programs.

Funeral programs may be submitted at any of several scheduled special collection sites. Dates, times, and places for those collections are listed below. Programs may also be submitted to any member of MPAAGHS. The deadline for submission to be included in this project is October 10, 2009. Although members of MPAAGHS will continue to collect funeral programs, only those submitted by this deadline are guaranteed for inclusion in the project with the Virginia Historical Society and FamilySearch.

For further information, call 804.651.8753.

The following table lists the Middle Peninsula/Northern Neck Funeral Programs Project collection times and places. Note that they all take place on Saturdays.