Obituary project completed

A joint effort has recently been completed to place nearly 4,000 obituaries on "The Odebolt History Pages" web site. Covering the years of 1942 to 2004, the obituaries are of people from Odebolt and surrounding areas in Sac, Crawford & Ida County, Iowa. There are also many obituaries of people with area connections.

The obituaries were collected by Betty Raasch from Odebolt and donated to the Odebolt Museum. Betty had clipped them from newspapers, mounted them on construction paper and had them organized in 3 boxes, 1942 through 1980, 1980 through 1990, and 1990 through 2003.  They were alphabetized in each box.

Stephanie Fleenor and her mother, Deb Reinhart have been doing their own family history and thought it was only appropriate to place this collection on the web site to help other family historians.  Steph talked to Kathy Larson, Museum Curator, who gave the Museum's permission.

Steph and Deb placed each page in a sheet protector and numbered the pages. The obituaries were indexed listing the name, maiden name (if known), birth date, death date, and cemetery where buried, and placed in numbered binders.  Steph then scanned each obituary page into the computer and gave them index numbers.  Barb Horak converted the indexes into web pages, uploaded the images and provided links from the names to the obituary images.

The museum sponsors "The Odebolt History Pages", edited by Odebolt natives Barb Horak, from Cedar Rapids and her sister Bonnie (Girvan) Ekse, Ankeny. The web site has been on-line since July 2001. In that time it has grown to nearly 450 web pages containing the history of the Odebolt area as well as hundreds of historic photos. The addition of the obituaries adds over 900 more pages.

The obituaries can be accessed at Odebolt Museum Obituaries