OFallon, IL City Records

The Belleville News-Democrat reported on Monday that the city of O'Fallon, Illinois has put their city records online.

O'FALLON -- If you want to peruse the city's bills or check on the ordinance about O'Fallon's special election of 1936, now you can do it from the comfort of your own home.

As the culmination of what he called an eight-year project, City Clerk Phil Goodwin said any records someone might normally come down to City Hall to see are now available online.

"With the assistance of the city's Information Technology Department, access to public documents via our Web site is now a reality," Goodwin said. "I have been striving toward this goal since I ran for office in 2001."

To my knowledge, I don't have any kin who are current or past residents of the city. However, their new Public Documents section does contain information that might be of interest to Family Historians who do.

The Public Documents section is set up as a series of folders and subfolders like on your own computer.

Inside the City Clerk/Public/Cemetery Minutes Agenda/Cemetery Disposition Records subfolder there are a series of folders with years from 1963-2009 containing scans of the Authorizations family gave the city to bury the deceased in the OFallon City Cemetery. There's no index, but if you know the year someone died, you can browse through the entries for that year until you find your relative. The documents contain

• Name and age of Deceased
• Lot Number, Section, Grave number
• Name of Lot Owner
• Date of Funeral
• Signature of Authorizer, and if not lot owner, relationship to lot owner

These are the records of most obvious interest to the family historian. There's also a Property Records subfolder under City Clerk/Public. These records aren't organized neatly by year, but the filenames contain the address, so if you know where a family member lived you might find something of interest.

I haven't looked through all the documents, so there might be some other items of interest. There's definitely a lot there for those interested in the local government process, and history of the city.