Volunteering at the Jasper County Records Center doesn’t mean the volunteer has to come to the center in Carthage every week and work.
Shirley Kennedy, 74, Joplin spends part of her time volunteering for the center from home.
She takes copies of records home with her and uses her home computer to create databases that people can use to more efficiently explore those records.
“What I do for the records center is I set up databases so you could look by name and it has been very helpful,” Kennedy said. “It makes it a lot easier to help the people who come in, researchers who come in looking for things.”
Before she began volunteering at the records center, she worked as job placement director at Vatterott College in Joplin, helping graduates of the college find jobs. She retired 10 years ago.
Kennedy said she and records center volunteer coordinator Marjorie Bull were friends in high school in Sarcoxie.
“I dropped by one day soon after I had retired and I honestly don’t remember why,” Kennedy said. “But I had known Margie ever since we were in high school, we were both born and reared in the Sarcoxie area, and she said why don’t you come volunteer. I’ve always been interested in genealogy and so I started volunteering. When I first started volunteering I was doing some indexing of will books and different kinds of things and set up databases of the poor farm records, which is very interesting.”
The Jasper County Poor Farm was located in the area where the Fair Acres Sports Complex is located now. A paupers’ cemetery is marked with a large stone marker near the Carthage water tower on River Street across from the new high school.
“They have the original poor farm records in the records center and I set up a database to access them because you can’t access the original records, they’re too fragile,” Kennedy said. “The database covers everything that’s in the record and that’s available to the public. The interesting thing about the poor farm is that it was labeled as the poor farm but it was really more like a county hospital. There were people who were not indigent who went to the poor farm. It was for people with mental disabilities and there were children who were left there before there was a children’s home. There were children who were born there and the database has all that information.”
