About

My name is Sharon Bart and I have recently rejoined as the Swisher County Coordinator for the USGenWeb Project. I am the original CC and previously served 9 years from 1996 to 2005, though my official record probably shows less than that. For those that had come to know me over that time, I want to explain why I was gone in the first place: there was another site created and a new CC assigned when a new state coordinator took over and they eventually decided to restructure and move the entire state to their own server. I imagine they sent a mass message to contact them which I did not see. Most of the activity on the mail list back then was election messages which were very frequent and I never really participated in, so I admit, I probably ignored the message as I was trying to get the site rebuilt as quickly as possible. My hard drive crashed and I had to recover all the data I had stored to add to the website. I decided to rebuild the site as I went and convert it to a better format.

Ironically, I was trying to make it so I only had one place to update the copyright because I was concerned that rarely touched pages might indicate the last time the site was updated. I also wanted a new email address since I was getting so much spam because of the amount of time my email address had been published online. Since I was getting so many webpages, updating this information and dealing with spam was becoming a full time job and not productive. Not to mention, I had a whole other county to do this for as well. Sadly, this realization came too late and what I suspected might happen had already happened, unbeknownst to me. I suspect that I wasn’t the only one this happened to since they now have a requirement of CC’s to ensure they list a last updated message on the main page to indicate you are still working on it, even when you really haven’t updated it.

So there you have it, the story of why I disappeared into thin air! Many tears did fall but I never inquired why it happened at the time. As fate would have it, I was diagnosed with a very painful autoimmune disease, got a divorce, a time consuming promotion, and then a brain tumor which required surgery to remove it. I couldn’t guarantee my outcome after the surgery, so I decided it was for the best. For those that now may be wondering, the tumor was benign. It was in my communication center so things like writing and organizing don’t come as easily to me as they once did, but my brain is reconfigurating itself nicely. No doubt thanks to the fact that I had very little downtime at work where my job was to write and organize. All these things wore me out though, so I’m taking some time off of working while I catch up with the rest of my life.

Now that I’m back, I am able to continue where I left off on this vision and I’m loving the new technology that would have been useful to have then. The new format I have chosen is more user friendly for the researcher and myself. It will also make updates and activity a bit more obvious, especially with it in blog format so that I may post messages as to what I’m working on.

If your new to genealogy on the internet, the Swisher County Genealogical Home Page is a part of the USGenWeb Project which was formed to make genealogical material available on the internet for free.

Each state in the United States has a homepage with resources for that state, and each county within that state has a homepage with genealogical materials for that county. Each hompage is maintained by at least one volunteer. This project has grown tremendously in since it was started in 1996, and and now we even have extended to the entire world with the WorldGenWeb Project.

The former Tule Creek Genealogical Society has been very instrumental in helping me get genealogical information online. In the past, we were one of the earliest, most developed county page in Texas and the entire project. Especially, because of a wonderful woman named Zoe Smith who is just a wealth of knowledge for county researchers. Without her, most of this information would not be online today.

With Zoe’s help, I obtained permission to publish most of the TCGS materials, including their book, “Interments in Swisher County and Vicinity!” It has an index to every known cemetery in Swisher County and even some surrounding areas outside of Swisher County. Many even have maps which could be helpful in locating your ancestor’s grave. I scanned and created a text file of all the information for use on this website. In addition, I will be adding images of all the pages in the coming months so that you may view the original document in the event you feel there my be a typo.

Zoe also maintained an index of obituaries for Swisher County, and she has graciously donated it for use on this site!

She has compiled a lot of other information to share, such as an index to the early death records of Swisher County, which is also online. It’s people like Zoe that help us obtain information we probably never would have found otherwise.

You can help too! Wouldn’t it be great to have a history of Swisher County online? I am working on that too, so if you have any such as photos, yearbooks, church records, directories or phone books, newspaper articles, souvenirs, etc, or stories to share about the towns businesses and people of Swisher County, I’d love to include that information on this website to share with everyone.

I hope you enjoy your visit here! Check back often, as I will be adding a lot of information, and please forgive me for the broken links you may come across. They will be fixed as soon as possible. Reporting by commenting on any page needing corrected would be a great help!

Sharon Bart
Swisher County Coordinator

In the past I received so much appreciation from the visitors of my site and since so much thanks goes to Zoe Smith and so many others who submitted information I am going to list a few of the comments here. They are for them as well as me. If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so directly on this page. The comments will not show up until I approve them since the internet has more spam than ever before. You can also submit them to the address in the image at the top of the page. Thanks so much to those who took the time for thanks. Your friendly words keep me going!

“I have nothing to add to your Swisher Co page but I do want to express my enjoyment at surfing thru Swisher. You have done an excellent job; others could definitely take lessons from you. I was so surprised at the amount of information I was able to find here. The person I was searching for turned out to be the wrong person but your page helped me determine this fact. Really did enjoy this page! Keep up the good work” – Angie Smith, date unknown