Greetings from your library fund trustees!

2020 Covid restrictions, the firing of the last library director, and temporary closings of Smyth County Public Library made for a slow down in your library committee’s on-site activity this year. The planned installation of Robert Madison & Mildred Manton Copenhaver Pictures have been postponed indefinitely. Book sales of “Ancestors and Descendants of Judge John Alexander and Martha Matilda Peck Kelly 1555” have not taken place yet either. But your committee has been busy non-the-less!
September 29, 2020 a quorum of your committee met to discuss, vote, and purchase several new resources for the Southwest Virginia Heritage Library based on funds received for the Martha Hull Copenhaver Special Collections. Your committee chair had met with Martha Copenhaver and attended several online conferences on genealogy research during the shutdown. One major takeaway 1s that the new “hot topic” is Gateway Ancestors! Gateway ancestors are a critical documental link back across the ocean to the homeland of origin, which can extend genealogical records to Middle Ages. As many of you know, there is a life cycle to when these certain materials come to market....passing of a generation, purging of libraries, eliminations of 100 year old library catalog items, disintegration of actual books, etc..... Many of these types of books will not be digitized into public domain either. Therefore, the time is right to acquire several primary source references documenting
Anglo-Scots-Irish connections 1700-1900. For our region of interest, we logically focused primarily on names, places, dates closely connected to Southwest Virginia. To that end we purchased rare (mostly original) copies of the following, which the library did not already possess:

Burkes’ Peerage Baronetage 1875
900 Immigrants to The American Colonies, Quebec, or the United States
Vol.1&2
Burke’s American Families with British Ancestry (A Lineage of 1,600 families)
Notable Southern Families, Vol.2 by Zella Armstrong

We are grateful for the underwriting which allowed us to move forward with these acquisitions. We are also thankful for obtaining special references unique to family research to help all those who seek. Depending on restrictions, we hope to meet
virtually in Spring then resume In-person business at reunion time. Please donate in memorium, in honorarium or for yourself to our library by sending checks to:

Frederick and Eve Phillippi Copenhaver
Memorial Library Fund

C/O Francis Joseph Copenhaver, Jr. -Treasurer
515 Crab Orchard Lane

Marion, Virginia 24354