Barbara Stenberg – November 2024
Remember when you were a newbie genealogist? When it was all a blur, and you didn’t know where to start? Well, over the past eighteen years, one of the things you could have done was to sign up for the Novice Genealogy class at WVGS. Many have over the years, and we thought it was time for a Volunteer Appreciation Award for the individual from whom those students got their start.
All those years your teacher would have been Barbara Joan McGee Stenberg. Barb was born in Williston, North Dakota, and married Vernon Stenberg in Oregon in 1956. He was in the Navy as a chaplain and spent 12 of their first 18 months of marriage in the Persian Gulf. Vernon switched to the Naval Reserve after active duty, and they moved around before landing in Sacramento for forty years. They had four children and, when the youngest was off to school, Barb went to college, earning a nursing degree at age 65.
She got interested in genealogy as a teenager but couldn’t get much information from her mother. She started researching anyway and, when she found her mother’s family in an 1880 census in West Virginia, the memories started flowing. Eventually, she qualified to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Barb and Vern’s retirement plan was to move to Arizona, but Barb had to do that alone when Vernon died in 2002. The first thing Barb did when she arrived in 2003 was to join the Spirit of Grace Lutheran Church in Surprise. She was in the choir and ran the bell choir program there for many years. The second thing she did was to join WVGS in November of 2003. Two months later she was donating books. I am sure she was an Aide first – most of us active volunteers were. But, by 2006, she was teaching Novice Genealogy. Her largest class was 18 (we advertised that time), and it’s often been two or three or four. She says she’s always enjoyed responding to the lively interest of those students newly interested in genealogy.
She served as Board Secretary in 2017-18 and has continued as an Aide ever since as well as teaching. As a member of the DAR, we’ve tapped her expertise more than once; the latest being to handle the DAR information we received as part of the Donaldson Collection. WVGS ‘s central mission is genealogy education, and Barb has been a key part of getting new genealogists started on the right track. She will be much missed in that role. Thank you, Barb, for all you’ve taught us!