Genealogy as a Local History Project

I have been digging into several of the my town’s local “founding” families over the past nine months or so.  There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which is that I am at a point with my own genealogy work that is more clean-up and less research.  This is both because I have done a lot of research but more importantly, because I have collected information and evidence without fully integrating it into my knowledge and database.  So in order to keep myself from looking for a piece of information that I already have, I am doing the clean-up I should have been doing all along.  The hope is that when I have cleaned my act up, I will be able to see more easily what I want/need to research next for each family line.

As a reward to myself, however, I am researching some local family trees.  The first project I thought of is an outgrowth of the work I am doing at my local public library in the local history room.  This collection has been largely neglected for much of its existence due to its having to rely mostly on volunteer efforts.  The library itself is now occupying an old building in town (c 1874) that was originally built and paid for by a woman whose husband’s family was one of the first settling in the area.  Since she was able to make this donation because of his estate, and the building is named after them (Flint Memorial Hall), I think there should be a family tree showing their ancestors.

There are pictures of each of the Flints in a couple of locations around the building, and others that are now in storage due to lack of wall space for hanging in public areas.  The local history room has smaller copies of two of these pictures displayed and I would like to have a family tree that can also be displayed near their pictures.