FGS Announces Sandra H. Luebking Memorial

For Immediate Release
22 February 2011

FGS ANNOUNCES SANDRA H. LUEBKING MEMORIAL

Now Accepting Contributions to the War of 1812 Digitization Project

22 February 2011 – Austin, TX. The Federation of Genealogical Societies (FGS) announces the establishment of the Sandra H. Luebking Memorial as a way of remembering the work and achievements of an influential leader in the genealogy community, the late Sandra Hargreaves Luebking.

With Sandra’s passing on 17 February 2011, we lost a teacher, a mentor, a colleague and a dear friend who made numerous contributions to the field of genealogy and family history.

Those who wish to remember Sandra and to help improve access to genealogy research records can now contribute to the Sandra H. Luebking Memorial to help make War of 1812 pension files available to researchers. As an active member of the FGS family and as Editor of FORUM from 1990 to 2010, Sandra was a huge supporter of the Preserve the Pensions project (http://www.fgs.org/1812/). This project was one of her personal choices as a memorial should anyone choose to honor her after her passing.

The Preserve the Pensions project is a national fund-raising initiative to raise $3.7 million to digitize of the War of 1812 pension files. The digitization process will enable online access by historians and family researchers to the memories and biographies of those who fought to protect our nation’s independence.

The pension records for the War of 1812 consist of more than 7.2 million documents in 180,000 files. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) receives more than three thousand requests per year for War of 1812 pensions, placing them among the most requested sets of records. Digitizing these valuable records will preserve the originals by removing them from continued heavy use. It will also make the images of the records much more widely available. NARA reports these important historical records already have been conserved and readied for digitization, so scanning could start as soon as funds are received. With the cost for digitizing and saving a single page from a pension file being fifty cents, supporters will see progress from the earliest days of the fund-raising initiative.

To make a contribution as a memorial to Sandra H. Luebking, visit the Preserve the Pensions donation page (https://www.fgs.org/1812/donation.php). The names of donors will appear in FORUM and a notice will be sent to Sandra's family.