Stephanie Sparks, 1stvp@azwvgs.org
Duplicate Books Team
Elaine Wright, Jill Mitchell and Della Jones
The Duplicate Books Team at WVGS consists of three people – Della Jones, Elaine Wright and Jill Mitchell. They organize the donated books, price them, put them on the website so they can be found online as well as in the library. They move them back and forth to the seminar as well as to monthly meetings. In March, we honored them for the hours they spend doing that. Their sales resulted in more than $2,000 last year for our operating budget, the equivalent of 50 memberships.
Della Jones
Della couldn’t be at the membership meeting, as she was recuperating from a stay in the hospital. I can tell you, I have worked with her for the last eight years, first on CDC, then on the Board, then as part of the Bylaws Committee and the Policies and Procedures Committee. She was the organized one who did the difficult work of corralling all the different Policies and Procedures into a single common format that fit what the website required – a sometimes “pull your hair out” process.
Jill Mitchell
Jill was born in Angola, Indiana, and raised in northeast Ohio. She moved to Arizona in high school, got an accounting degree, taught math for the Maricopa County Community Colleges while operating a business with her husband for 30 years.
Her paternal grandfather started the family genealogy when he retired to Sun City in 1967. He
was of the generation that travelled to libraries, typed letters, and waited for replies in the mail. When he was 85, he handed it off to Jill.
Jill joined WVGS in 2012 after attending an Open House, but didn’t begin to actively volunteer until about 2014. Since then she’s been part of Fundraising and Membership Outreach, Long Range Planning, and CDC, picking up responsibility for Duplicate Books along the way, then on the Board as 1st Vice President and then Co-Treasurer.
Jill learned the lesson of verifying family lore early on. Her mother-in-law Irene related that her grandmother was named Rose and Rose’s sisters were named after flowers as well – Violet and Iris. The 1891 records in Norfolk, England had slightly different information – the daughters actually had been named Ethel, Mary and Martha.
Elaine Wright
Elaine was born in Graham, a small town in North Central Texas. The family moved to Colorado when she was four, and lived in Grand Junction until she married and moved to Phoenix in 1985. Elaine was an elementary school teacher, teaching Kindergarten for 19 years, and then working as a school librarian for 13 years. When she retired in 2012, she attended a retired school librarian luncheon. She sat by two high school librarians who told her about WVGS and immediately joined. Her first volunteer assignment was reading shelves and helping with inventory.
She began keeping notes about family stories and history when she was very young. She would periodically travel back to visit family in Texas. Her dad would take her on the “cemetery tour” where they would visit multiple country cemeteries to clean the headstones and listen to her dad tell stories about their ancestors. Then, before leaving the area they would stop at the local courthouse looking for records.
Her parents came for a visit after she moved to Arizona and her dad wanted to do a “cemetery tour.” She was surprised to learn that she had family that had moved from Texas to Arizona in 1923! They went looking and found them in Tempe,
Apache Junction, and Punkin Center, Arizona (near Roosevelt Lake), and found several family members at Double Butte Cemetery in Tempe. She found her great-great grandmother, but where was great-great grandfather? They found him buried on the other side of the road that goes through the cemetery. Her dad said they never got along.
I think everyone appreciates that you will find people to talk with about genealogy when you join WVGS. And I think a lot of volunteers will also tell you how much fun it is to work together doing something that helps the organization thrive. We
invite you to volunteer, too. Help WVGS thrive, find new friends. Come and have fun with us.