Ted Myhre visited me at my house and we talked for a long time about what I have done and what my plans are. Ted is descended from Ole Sampson, one of the first settlers of Six Mile Grove, and also from the Myhre family which was very active in the early days of the city of Lyle. He has some cool stuff (including postcards I have never seen) up on his website: http://myhrefamily.org

I wrote a grant that Mower County Historical Society submitted to the Worth County Development Authority for their fall round of grants. If approved, this grant will digitize all existing issues of the Lyle Tribune and make them available online from MCHS office (and potentially other places in the future). I applied for around $8,000 which is the cost of digitizing, and I'd build the website myself using ResCarta. It is a long shot but I have my fingers crossed! Grants will be awarded on November 15.

My lylealumni.com facebook page has officially passed over 500 followers. For comparison, "Adams Now & Then" has 788 followers, "Mower County Historical Society" has 575, and "Mitchell County Historical Society" has 855. I wish I could change the name to "Lyle Historical Society" but it looks to be too hard to change.

I added a separate content type and a view for all funeral programs. Previously they were jammed in as newspaper clippings but they didn't really fit there. Most of the ones that are currently up come from Sue Horgen and I have many more from Dona Ziegler that will be added.

The Minneapolis StarTribune just made its archives available online, fully searchable from the 1800s to present. I paid for a 6-month subscription and have started adding some clippings. There are actually a surprising number of them about Lyle.

Just applied for another MN Legacy grant through Mower County Historical Society, this time to microfilm all known issues of the Lyle Tribune. The Lyle Tribune was published from 1892 - 1951 and Mower County Historical Society has newspapers in their archive from 1895 - 1951 with a few holes. The papers are in bad shape and will soon be unusable unless they are preserved. I applied for the April 14 deadline so should hear something back by end of May or early June.

I'm going to apply for potentially two grants: a MN Legacy grant for microfilming the existing paper copies of the Lyle Tribune held by Mower County Historical Society, and a Worth County Development Authority grant for digitizing those issues. The MN Legacy grant deadline is mid-April and the Worth County Development Authority grant deadline is September 1.

I've been adding a number of newspaper clippings, both of new things as they happen from the Austin Daily Herald, and also older articles from the St. Ansgar Enterprise. As of today, there are 1,227 news articles on the website, mostly obituaries.

I submitted the final report for Lyle Oral History Phase 1: Churches and Organizations and it was accepted. That project is officially complete.

I made an index of every issue that I could find online of the Lyle Leader News supplement in the St. Ansgar Enterprise from May 1959 to October 1974. Published weekly, this contains over 760 issues of the Lyle Leader. Next step is to publish the index with direct links to the issue in question, then start building an index to the stories that were contained in each issue of the Lyle Leader. I've been extracting only obituaries so far, but there are many other things like sports stories that should be extracted.

I did a final presentation for Lyle Oral History Phase 1: Churches and Organizations at Lyle High School on 4 December 2016. There were about 25 people there including many of the narrators from the project.

On October 2, 2016 I completed oral history interviews with Larry Ricke of Austin, Betty Fisher of Lyle and Patty Conradt of Rose Creek. This makes 10 interviews completed, which is what is required for the grant. I may do a few more if there is left-over budget.

I finalized the structure that I want to use for newspaper clippings, whether they are scanned from paper or directly from the web. I uploaded all the clippings from Sue Horgen for Pleasant Hill cemetery and started adding some other ones as they come up in my research. As of today, there are about 1,100 that have been uploaded. There are many that need transcription-- if you would like to help transcribe newspaper articles please contact me!

I continue to take photos of area cemeteries. I have taken photos of every headstone in: Six Mile Grove, Woodbury, Cedar City, Oak Lane (Rustad), Union Presbyterian - Stacyville and Union Township. I also started taking some photos of Grandview near Austin.

I played around with a way of adding newspaper clippings to this website and added a number of them as examples. I'm hoping to use this to upload the 900+ clippings from Sue Horgen for obituaries at Pleasant Hill cemetery as its first big test. The are located under the "Data" menu item.

I recorded oral history interviews with Leonard Haugland of Austin, MN and Gerald Sampson of Lyle, MN on July 13.

I started taking photos of every headstone in Woodbury cemetery and have taken about 450 so far. I also got a big box of Woodbury cemetery records and other info from David Howard that I'm sorting through.

I applied for a $30,000 grant from the State of Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund to get all the newspapers at the Mower County Historical Society put on microfilm. This includes many decades of the Lyle Tribune which I believe are the only copies that exist. This is the second time I'm applying for this grant, the first time it was rejected for an unrelated technical reason. I'm also pursuing a separate funding source directly with the newspaper department at the Minnesota Historical Society that would microfilm and digitize these papers. My ultimate goal is to have the Lyle Tribune preserved on microfilm and also available digitally. Having the digitized copy would be wonderful for doing keyword searches and doing research from home.

I found and sorted through hundreds of obituaries from the St. Ansgar Enterprise and added them to findagrave.com. This paper is online for all years from the late 1800s to 2014, with a gap in the 1980s-1990s. I'm not sure if the paper was published during that time or not. The Lyle Leader News was published as a supplement to the St. Ansgar Enterprise in the 1950s-1970s so it's great to have another online resource for Lyle.

I recorded my first oral history interview with Bill Bell of Austin, MN on April 29.

I am working on getting all the recording equipment for the oral history grant. I have it all picked out and it should be shipped soon. It will take some time to play and practice with before I am ready for a real interview.

I've been combing through the Mower County Transcript newspaper on the Library of Congress Chronicling America website. It has an excellent search capability. I've been looking for any obituaries, burial or death notices for Six Mile Grove, Woodbury, Rose Creek Enterprise (aka Varco), Cedar City, Mona, and Pleasant Hill cemeteries. I found and transcribed a few hundred, adding them to findagrave.com. I'll also keep a copy to add to my yet-to-be-built database of people. The St. Ansgar Enterprise Journal also has a pretty good archive up on the St. Ansgar library's website. It has many newer obituaries that I haven't yet started to sort through. Lastly, I added all the recent obituaries for the Austin Daily Herald and the Rochester Post Bulletin that I had previously scraped onto lylealumni.com.

I'm very happy to announce that my oral history grant application "Lyle Oral History Phase 1: Organizations and Churches" has been funded by the Minnesota Historical Society! I I applied through the Mower County Historical Society who is the official awardee and the award amount is $9,529. The official announcement is here: http://www.mnhs.org/media/news/5584.

I have the official listings for Pleasant Hill, Six Mile Grove and Woodbury cemeteries. I also have the listing of Pleasant Hill from findagrave.com and a listing I made of Pleasant Hill from all the obituaries Sue Horgen collected. I'm working on the comparison now but it is slow. I don't really have a good system yet so it relies a lot on manual checking and spreadsheets. Given what I have seen so far, I estimate about 700 graves are missing from these cemeteries on findagrave.com, most of which are in Six Mile Grove cemetery. I'll have to see how this turns out, but I'm also considering expanding to some of the other local cemeteries such as Cedar City, London, Rose Creek Enterprise, etc.