Our Club…
Throughout the Years
Current Members
Check Out:
- our Welcome page for more details on how the club operates.
- Sydney Cruice’s paper Preparing for the Help Desk to assist in formulating research questions.
- our page on Zoom Instructions to prepare for our next meeting
Our Meetings
The Main Line Genealogy Club meets the 2nd Thursday of the month, September through June, from 1 to 3 pm (EST/EDT). Join us a half hour early (12:30pm) to ask questions at our Genealogy Help Desk.
These are hybrid meetings, in-person at the Tredyffrin Public Library and online through Zoom so you can participate either way.
Next Club Event
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Tredyffrin Public Library
582 Upper Gulph Rd, Strafford, PA 19087
Our Administration
The club is a Pennsylvania Not-for-Profit Association run by a set of volunteers called the Planning Committee. They share the responsibilities for the administration of club meetings. The members of the Planning Committee are:
- Karen Alejnikov
- Bill Baker
- Paul Campbell-Trimbur
- Gail Cooper
- Sydney Cruice
- Joe Hunter
- Michael Kearney
- Lillian Mann
- Laverna Saunders
Past Members of the Planning Committee
· Cheryl Bittner · Gail Cappelli · Bruce Arnold · Marilyn Toole · Ted Laws · Susan Hedrick · Craig TenBroeck · Shirley Blake ·
Heidi Sproat ·
Our History
The Main Line Genealogy Club began as a Special Interest Group of the Main Line MacIntosh Users Group. The first mention of the group was in a 2001 newsletter, but it wasn’t until the following year that the club actually formed. Craig TenBroeck and Mimi Connelly were the initial leaders and those first meetings were held at Mimi’s house. There were also several occasions where we met at the Quadrangle Retirement Home as we had several people who resided there. There were usually about 6-8 attendees for the first several months as we were limited to MacIntosh users.
Craig TenBroeck was the original President and along with Mimi Connolly, the founders of the Main Line Genealogy Club. Our first speaker was Herbert Zearfoss, the President of the Pennsylvania Genealogical Society. Since then, we have been fortunate to have a speaker almost every month and they have added immensely to our genealogy knowledge. We have had several speakers from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Chester County Archives, as well as speakers who teach genealogy courses or have businesses in the field.
We soon realized, however, that we were interested in genealogy and the computer platform used was not important. We decided to open up the meetings to anyone interested in genealogy and started to advertise in the local papers. Sometime in the early months of 2003, Mimi made arrangements with the Easttown Library & Information Center for a room where we could hold our monthly meetings. Initially, our meetings were workshops where we got together to discuss genealogy problems and how to solve them. We soon realized that there were many people in the area who were very knowledgeable in many genealogy areas, and we could benefit from their knowledge, so we started to invite speakers for these monthly Thursday meetings.
The Club’s Initial Focus … the Main Line
Early Main Line History
The Main Line, once home to the Lenni Lenape Tribe of Indians, was settled in the 1600’s, when William Penn sold land to a group of Welsh Quakers. It became a collection of affluent towns in the western suburbs of Philadelphia named after the Public Works project of the 1820s, the Main Line of Public Works. These works created the Columbia-Philadelphia Railroad which eventually became the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Main Line connecting Philadelphia with Pittsburgh.
The Counties
The counties covered include Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties. In working on early Main Line records, the challenge lies in finding out which county holds the records you are looking for because in previous centuries the county boundaries were very different.
The Main Line Today
The collection of Philadelphia western suburbs along Lancaster Avenue (Route 30) and the Pennsylvania Railroad line, extends from the Philadelphia city limits to about Malvern covering an area of about 200 square miles. The principal townships comprising the Main Line are (from the east): Lower Merion Township, Haverford Township, Radnor Township, Tredyffrin Township, Easttown Township, Malvern Borough, East Whiteland Township, and Charlestown Township.
