Memorial Day Services Honoring Veterans at Cambridge Cemetery - May 30, 2011

The American Legion will have their ceremony honoring Veterans at the Cambridge Cemetery at 11 a.m. on Monday, May 30, 2011.  The American Legion Auxiliary has placed American flags at the grave markers of the veterans.

Cambridge Alumni Association Banquet - June 4, 2011

The annual Cambridge Alumni Association Banquet will be June 4, 2011.  If you did not receive a form, you can click on the pictures to the left for details. (Click on the picture a second time for a larger version.)  A PDF of the form for printing is available here.

The Cambridge Historical Association will have an open house before the banquet from 3 to 5 p.m.   Come and see our Cambridge School memorabilia among other displays.

Talk with American Legion Auxiliary - March 1, 2011

The Cambridge Historical Association was invited by the Mathias-Wire Legion Auxiliary to speak with them at their monthly meeting.  Florence Wheeler and Wayne Messer discussed the history of the Cambridge Historical Association, some of our current projects - particularly the Veterans lists for Memorial Day - and some of the upcoming events.  Afterwords, many from the group joined us for a tour of our building and displays.

Thank you for the invitation and your hospitality!

Creating a Search Checklist

To help us provide better service for requests for history of Cambridge and surrounding area residents, we are developing a checklist of our sources.  The current version is shown below so we and you can work with it.  Please let us know your experience with it and how we might improve it. 

Background:  What does the requester know about the topic already?  And what would they like to know?  Any dates, events, locations, etc.will help suggest sources to check or ignore.

Searching for individuals and/or families:

1.  Are they in our books?  The expanded table of contents for the Sesquicentennial and Schools books may help.  Also, we have begun a name index for the Sesquicentennial book.
2. Are there any Family Histories of interest?  Our Family History holding are being listed.
3. Are they a veteran?  The Sesquicentennial book lists many of the Cambridge veterans.  A Civil War Veterans working page is available.  Also see the Veterans binder.
4. Check the obituary index and the alphabetical binders.
5. Are they buried in local cemetery?  We have the 1992 listings from the Story County Genealogical Society for many of the local townships.  These each have indexes by name and readings of the gravestones at the time.
6. Check binder(s) for particular years.

Also, outside sources that may be useful include:

1. Check History of Story County Vol 1 Vol 2 (Google Books)  We have parts of these; however, by using the Google Books links you can search within the books.
2. Check Nevada Community Historical Society Family Trees.  Despite its name, many other Story County residents are included.
3. Check Roland Record.  You can search and view these papers online.  If searching for Cambridge, do not include Iowa.  Most of the entries assume Iowa for Cambridge.
4. Check Story County Genweb.  They have a variety of materials available.
5. For World War II Veterans, check the Ames Historical Society Index to WW2 Veterans.

As we update this checklist, you can see the most recent version here.

Family Histories at the Cambridge Historical Association

As part of our collection, the Cambridge Historical Association has a number of family histories.  Some of these are genealogies and others are collections of articles or other materials from or about particular families.  We are listing these holdings in a series of entries on our website.  Those whose name begins with A - B can be found in our earlier post.

While we are doing this, we are also creating what will be a list and description of our complete holdings in this area.  See this page on our wiki to follow the ongoing creation of the list.

Part of what we are adding to the complete list are cross-references from other family names to help us locating pertinent material for requests.  Please let us know what other information might help you in using this.

2010 Meeting with County Supervisors

The Story County Historical Alliance meets with the Story County Supervisors each year to describe our accomplishments.  This year the Ames Historical Society hosted a meeting with Jane Haliburton, Wayne Clinton, and Paul Toot on November 23, 2010.  You can read a short summary of the other historical societies programs here.

The accomplishments we reported were:

• Moving the Cambridge Historical Association into the building donated by the Masons.
• This has lead to an increase in Life memberships and artifacts donations
• It also provided a location for expanding our displays for Jubilee Days open house
• Updated our Veterans list to work with the American Legion and American Legion Auxiliary for Memorial Day
• Working with Civil War Remembrance group for the Civil War Sesquicentennial
• Added a current events website Cambridge Happenings to announce upcoming local events
• Obituaries index being updated and expanded
• Our volunteer hours are approaching 500 this year (before the end of the year we did pass 500 hours!)

Thank you to the Supervisors for their continuing interest and support.

Family Histories - A - B

As part of our collection, the Cambridge Historical Association has a number of family histories.  Some of these are genealogies and others are collections of articles or other materials from or about particular families.

We have two Apland collections.  One is various clippings about the Apland barn (Apland/Freeland Barn), Apland reunions, and obituaries.  The other is Ole Birchaug Descendants from May 2006 which goes back to 1710.  Many local family names are included.  Copies of Apland i Merika Avis (Aplands in America newsletter) from March 1996 and 1999, Norway in World War II, and a translation of "The Early Settlers from Stavanger and Hadaland, Norway in Central Iowa" are also in this binder.  The translation is from a Norwegian book by Hjalmer Rued Holand A.M. 1908.

The binder Bastesen contains exerpts from Erasmus Rosenberger and His Families in Germany and America.  The earliest entry in the parts we have is from 1758.

The Bauge binder has articles about the historic Bauge Farmhouse and its move to Ames.  Nils Bauge was the original member of the family living in the log home which was built in 1866.

The Berhow Family Tree also contains minutes from the Berhow Reunion from 1932 to 2000.  Berhow was named for a farm on the island of Halsnoy on the coast of Norway.  The family tree has names to before 1692.  As an aside, the Huxley Historical Society has information about the origin of Berhow Park in Huxley, Iowa.

The Bundy Descendants - Descendants of William Bundy has the first child born about 1667 in North Carolina.  This is 12 pages long and includes some information from 2001.  Local family names include Cook, Tillotson, and Zook.