Even in retirement, Verda Baird dedicates her time to preserving local history

FAIRFIELD - Few people have done more to document the families of Jefferson County than Verda Baird.

Baird, who is not a native of the county but has lived here for most of her life, has published 25 books and articles for the local genealogical section of the Fairfield Public Library. She once served as the Correspondence Secretary for the Jefferson County Genealogical Society, and responded to more than 4,600 requests for information from people inquiring into their ancestry.

In 2010, after 33 years of being a great help to researchers, Baird announced her 'retirement” from genealogy, leaving the majority of the legwork to Richard Thompson. However, since then, Baird has remained busy in chronicling and documenting the county's history. Just a few months ago in December, she finished a lengthy project to sort through articles and newspaper clippings on the county's history, and organized them into files the public can access at the Fairfield library.

Baird said this project began when the library moved from its former location inside the Carnegie Historical Museum to its new building a block south and west in 1996. The librarian at the time, Jim Rubis, tasked Baird with organizing a cabinet dedicated to local history in the new library.

'Genealogy was my hobby, and I seldom snooped into the history stuff, but I knew it was there,” she said.

Baird sorted the articles into three piles: Towns, Churches, and A-Z, a large miscellaneous list of all the schools, clubs, organizations, closed businesses, old hotels and bygone manufacturers. Baird said a number of people contributed submissions to her collection over the years, and she's sad to report that they're all deceased now.

Mary Prill, one of the pioneers in amassing the county's extensive genealogical records, left Baird a 1969 map of the county. Prill noted that she had tried in vain to identify the location of five defunct towns in the county: Bravo, Cotton Grove, Pleasant Grove, Typee and Webster. After Mary's husband Orville Prill died in 1997, his son Ron gave Baird the contents of Mary's four-drawer filing cabinet. In it, Baird discovered that Mary saved the 1939 centennial article listing the 100 churches created from 1839 to 1939 in Jefferson County. Baird dug through the records for photos of each one, attempting to update the list through the year 2000.

Baird and Eugene Kaska went through old issues of the Lockridge Times from 1916-1966 and cut out many articles for the file cabinet.

'Lillian Thada wrote the most interesting articles in the weekly Town Crier,” said Baird, who added that Rubis gave all those articles to her after Thada's death. Baird put them in a two-volume hard-bound set which now sits on the library's shelves, complete with an index.

Baird said she is indebted to the help of William Baker, publisher of 'Villages & Towns of Yesteryear” in 1982, and Ben Taylor, whom she calls a 'walking history book.”

'After the death of [Taylor's] wife Lucille, I would get a phone call, ‘Hi Verda, this is Uncle Ben [no actual relation]. When you come to town next, please stop by the house.' He always had something to be tucked away in the history drawers and at age 86 had no children and wanted to chat.”

Baird and her husband cleaned out five rows of shelves from Lee Gobble, 'Mr. Fairfield.” She also put in clippings from her tenure of writing 'Out of the Past” columns for The Fairfield Ledger.

Baird's interest in history and genealogy began in 1973 when she ventured out into a fresh 4-inch February snowfall to attend a meeting that would change her life forever. It was of the newly formed Jefferson County Genealogical Society, and she became one of its 52 charter members.

The group copied early death, birth and marriage records from 1880-1899 from the courthouse onto 3x5-inch notecards. The group alphabetized the cards, and typed them with a typewriter.

'Using special carbon, I was able to make five legible copies in the Fairfield Public Library with copies in three other libraries in Iowa,” Baird said. Beginning in 1977, Baird became the group's corresponding secretary. She said research back then involved reading a lot of census records from the 1850s and 1860s, and piecing together families by digging through cemetery records.

Baird said she hardly charged anything to the people who asked her to perform this research, but after a while she was getting so many requests she could no longer keep it up.

'Finally I had to start charging, first $5 an hour then $7.50 and later $10,” she said.

Baird said the most customers she had in one year came in 2000 when she had 332.

'I kept my rural mail box busy,” she said. 'Everyone wrote three or four times before they got everything they wanted on their family.”

Since Baird had gone to such lengths to compile information on each request, she figured that she might as well make her work public by putting her research into a series of bound volumes. Library patrons will find a series of eight green volumes in the genealogical section that reflects Baird's research.

Baird can't get away from genealogy even in retirement. Even while this interview with The Union was being conducted at the Fairfield Public Library, two people came over to Baird to ask her questions about how to find something in the genealogy section. And Baird was thrilled to help.

The history of genealogical research in the county is somewhat bittersweet, because the society that did so much work on this front dissolved shortly after its 40-year anniversary.

'We got to the point where nobody wanted to give a program, and nobody wanted to copy records at the courthouse,” Baird said.

One problem that genealogists have today is that the state has strict privacy laws, so it's difficult to do research on a person who's not a relative. That said, the genealogical section at the Fairfield Public Library is a testament to the hours and hours of work Baird and others have put into preserving family histories of the county. Baird remarked that when she answered her first correspondence in 1976, the library had 20 books on genealogy, and now it has 257.