Washington State Pioneer Pursuit has launched!
We encourage every genealogist to participate in this project. You may win a prize of $150, $100 or $50 for your submissions.
Washington State Pioneer Pursuit is the vision of WSGS past president, Virginia Majewski. Ginny saw the need to update our Pioneer Project site that was created to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Washington Territory becoming a state on 11 November, 1889. At that time Societies and genealogist around Washington were encouraged to submit data for their families who were living here at statehood. Over 4,500 names of heads of household were indexed and the family data was saved behind our firewall for about 30,000-40,000 other individuals here at statehood. However, our state had over 349,390 individuals living here so this data base is well short of genealogies.
Genealogists will compete for awards of $150, $100 and $50 for the most entries and a single entry will award them a FREE one-year membership to WSGS for 2024. ALSO, your society receives points for every entry you send in to the project so they also will be entered into the contest to win awards. You don’t have to be a member of a Society to participate.
Start with your pioneer, if you have one, and then submit other names of families who may have been living near that are not in our data base. Maybe you want to tackle an ethic group that is under represented such as the Chinese, those with black heritage, Croatians, indigenous individual families in our local tribes or the Lebanese. Be creative and find those lost individuals. PLEASE CHECK THE PIONEER INDEX FIRST! We don’t want you to duplicate information in the data base. And, your family were pioneers in Washington and may have moved away later; still document them and send in the data if they were here about 11 November, 1889!
Let us lead the way in the nation to have a website that has almost every person living in Washington at statehood. We encourage you to go to our site and print off the materials for the contest and you don’t have to be a member to participate (though we would love to have you in 2023 for $12.00 a year and 2024 would be a FREE year). It is a win-win situation for genealogists, Societies and the data base of WSGS for the State of Washington.
Go to https://www.wasgs.org (Washington State Genealogical Society)
Select Washington Pioneer Pursuit from the left bar to see the materials for your research.
Thank you and good hunting,
Kathleen Sizer, WSGS President