At our WSGS Board Retreat, 25 May 2015, I did an interview with Richard Kyle regarding the new additions to the YVGS library. Here are the points of that interview.

Richard was the Resource Specialist for the Yakima Family History Library from 1987 until 2008, when he resigned. A large part of his job was to keep track of and index the massive collection of film and fiche that was housed in the library. In 2012 he joined the Yakima Valley Genealogical Society and currently serves as a librarian several times a week and also co-chairs several workshops every month. He reported this important update to me at the WSGS Board Meeting on Friday, 25 April 2015.

The building that houses the Yakima Family History Library is in the process of being converted to another use. Because of this, the library was given a two week notice that they had to vacate to building. In 2013, due to the efforts of Richard and Pat Bundy (vice-president of the YVGS) the YVGS became an affiliate of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, allowing them to order and keep microfilm and fiche from that library. This, along with the fact that several times over the last few years the YVGS had informed the Family History Library that they had more than enough room to take over the collection for them if necessary, set the stage for the transfer of their film and fiche holdings to the YVGS library.

The LDS church in Yakima will re-open a family history library in one of the church buildings sometime later in the year. However, it will only contain a few computors, the bound books they had and two readers. The bulk of the collection was transferred to the YVGS library.

On Friday, April 25, 2015, a commercial moving company delivered ten microfilm cabinets (with their contents packed into moving boxes) and ten microfiche cabinets to the YVGS library building along with several microfilm and microfiche readers. An inventory is in the process of being completed so a complete list of transferred items can be sent to Salt Lake City. This is a permanent transfer and these new holdings will remain in the YVGS library indefinitely.

Quoting Richard, “This is the equivalent of 18,000 bound volumes on the shelf if the collection were converted to books. A large percentage of these records are original records. To get an idea of the actual size of this collection, when it was housed at the FHL in Yakima the indexes to the collection were on roughly 1,000 type written pages of titles.” The collection that will be retained is in the process of being reduced in size by pulling out all of the microfilms of the United States census and returning them to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. This will still leave the Yakima library with all of the fiche and roughly 6,500 rolls of microfilm. The collection should be fully cataloged and the online index atwww.yvgs.net updated by the end of June. The collection will not be co-mingled with already extensive collection of the YVGS library, but will be kept separate and apart.

The Yakima Valley Genealogical Society is proud to now know that their library is one of the largest genealogy libraries (both in physical size and in collection numbers) in the Pacific Northwest and invites you to come for a research visit anytime.

Visit their website for more information:  www.yvgs.net  and then Library.