Week 30 – Preserving Heritage – CGHS Funeral Program Collection

Heritage research often requires a variety of sources—sometimes from unexpected places. The Coastal Georgia Historical Society received a donation from Amy Roberts that provides a vital look at our area’s African American history. The collection of more than two hundred funeral programs, spanning the 1960s to the 2010s, comes from funerals on St. Simons and in Brunswick, as well as in nearby McIntosh County. Recently, the Historical Society has begun to digitize the collection. By following this link to the Society’s Online Collections Database, searchers may browse descriptions and images of each of the 224 programs. Many of the records also include information about interment and about the service’s officiant.

Funeral programs like these are recognized as good sources for both local history and genealogical research. The College of Coastal Georgia states that they are “especially [important] for African Americans whose obituaries were not traditionally published in newspapers until the 1960s and 1970s.” They include a wide range of biographical information about the deceased, and they help communities like ours to tell their local story. The College of Coastal Georgia also links to more than a dozen similar collections of funeral programs from around the southern United States. Another local resource, the Heritage Room at the Brunswick-Glynn County Library, contains cemetery records for many burial places throughout Glynn County and coastal Georgia. By combining these documents with information from funeral program collections, interested researchers may find out more about a person’s life through records of their burial.