Genealogy/Local History Request Guidelines
& Online Request Form
>We at the Public Library are happy to assist you in your genealogy research.
If you are out of town, or are unable to come in and use our genealogy collection yourself,
we do offer some free basic research services. Keep in mind that time and staff constraints prevent us from assisting
in detailed or large projects. Please allow at least 4
weeks for us to respond to your request (during peak times, it can take twice that long, or more). You may also
send your requests via postal mail or by phone.
In filling out the request form, please adhere to the following guidelines:
-Please do not request more than 3 obituary or birth notices, or article lookups (or any combination of these)
-Please have a specific date for your obituary/birth notices, or article lookups (our newspapers are not indexed);
the Knox County Health Department may be able to
assist you in pinpointing an exact date of birth or death
-Newspaper-related requests can only be searched in the Mount Vernon News, or its predecessors (please keep in
mind that our newspapers are NOT indexed, so a
specific date is required)
-We do not have original records (birth/death/marriage records); for their location, see our Help Sheet; we do
have incomplete indices to birth and marriage records
(which refer to courthouse records), as well as an sizable, though not complete, index to obituary notices
-Please no more than 3 index lookups (we cannot look up "all of the Smiths" in the Cemetery Index)
-We do have census records on microfilm for Knox County (and are planning to purchase CD-Roms), however, we do
not have indices for all of them, so we may not
be able to fulfill all census requests (and again, please no more than 3 names)
-If you are requesting information on a particular local business, organization, or institution, or if you are
seeking biographical information of persons, you may also want
to contact the Knox County Historical Society
-Please also keep in mind that federal copyright laws may prevent us from fulfilling a request (we cannot photocopy
an entire book, or significant portions of the book,
without permission from the author and/or publisher)
-If you would like to view microfilm that we do not currently own, we generally can borrow it for you. Please go
to our online Interlibrary Loan form.
Requests that do not adhere to these guidelines cannot be processed! We receive several requests per week. Time
and staff constraints prevent us dedicating significant
amounts of time to these requests.
We do not charge any fees for this service (although we reserve
the right to do so).
Keep this in mind the next time your local public library needs your support!
Please fill out this form in its entirety. Forms not filled out completely CANNOT be
processed.
Name:
Street:
City:
Telephone Number:
Email Address:
Nature of your Request:
Please list names, dates, etc., and give as many details as possible.