GENEALOGY

The Cape Girardeau Public Library’s genealogy section focuses primarily on Cape Girardeau County and some of the surrounding counties.  Visitors can find census records on microfilm from most Missouri counties and also some counties from Illinois, Kentucky and North Carolina.  The genealogy section offers county histories from nearby surrounding counties, published family histories from some local families, and microfilm archives of the Southeast Missourian back to 1918.  The section also has limited volumes of birth and death records for Cape Girardeau County and some surrounding counties.  Visitors to the genealogy section can also find ship records of immigrants in Passenger and Immigration Lists indexes and New Orleans Passenger Lists indexed on microfilm.

The Library also offers interlibrary loan services for microfilm records.  The library has microfilm records,  microfilm readers and a printer/scanner for visitors to use as well as a computer specially for genealogy researches.  The computer has several genealogy related databases and also a subscription to Ancestry.com.

If you are doing genealogy research on ancestors from the Cape Girardeau area, we invite you to come in and use our genealogy department.

For questions, please come into the reference department at the library, call us at 334-5279 or e-mail us at the reference department.