Diana Wittenberg – Feb 2023
The ‘Marie Beernink Volunteer Appreciation Award winner February 2023 is Diana Wittenberg.
As with most genealogy societies WVGS has local records we have collected, preserved, and made available for research. If you’ve been an active member of WVGS over the last few years, you’ve heard a lot about periodicals. But our longest-running project has been collecting obituaries. The current database contains over 140,000 obituaries and covers various US states, emphasizing the West Valley area of Maricopa County and Utah. The collection also includes death notices, memorial folders, and photographs.
We have already given the founder of this project – Ethel Sanders – a well-deserved award for her 20-year stewardship. But someone else FINISHED the project, getting all those obits digitized, first with a Committee who met at the library and then, during COVID, remotely. She would come to the library, pick up obits in paper form and distribute them to other committee members. When they had prepared them, she would pick them up and scan them. Then she would come back to the Library and upload the files so Ed Crabbe could do his part. The last portion of the original collection was on microfilm and transforming microfilm into a format that would allow them to be digitized turned out to be daunting. After much research, our volunteer found the Burton Barr Library downtown had a microfilm reader that would allow the scanning of our microfilm. On numerous trips, she prepared the scans in the appropriate format to be compatible with our database.
That volunteer was Diana Wittenberg. She was born and raised in the Kansas City, Kansas area, graduating from Turner High School and then from Park University in Missouri. She got married to Don, had two children, and now has two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. She worked for Hallmark Cards in Kansas City for 20 years and eventually migrated to Arizona.
She has always been interested in history, and her aunt’s interest in the subject led to annual family reunions. In 1967, after a move to a new neighborhood, the family’s Brittany spaniel decided to “go back home” and took his doghouse with him. He got as far as a neighbor’s yard, leading Diana to a new friendship with a woman who did genealogy research and gave Diana her first Everton Publishing Magazine, and off she went. Years spent with microfiche, microfilm, and books all helped give her the background to be part of the obit project.
She became an active volunteer at WVGS in 2014 and is or has been an Aide, the Director of Fundraising, the head of Research Services, and a member of the Collection Development Committee working on donated collections.