Fresno’s Heritage Center connects local families to history

Genealogy is a personal endeavor for Melissa Scroggins, the senior library assistant who guards the entrance of the San Joaquin Valley Heritage & Genealogy Center in Fresno. 

Genealogy — the formal study of ancestry and family history — once helped Scroggins solve a decades-old family mystery.

Scroggins’ great grandfather was a legend of family lore — a counterfeiter whose last name was Bond — but he was only a story, a myth — the family had no photos or records.

“It’s been terrible trying to find a counterfeiter named Bond,” Scroggins said.

After many years of research into birth certificates, death certificates, and prison records, Scroggins finally narrowed it down to two potential “Bonds” in a Kansas prison. After emailing the national archives in Kansas City, Scroggins got to the truth behind the family lore.

“He was sentenced to a year and a day [for counterfeiting]– I got his mugshots, finger prints, court records,” said Scroggins. “He counterfeited quarters, because he was a blacksmith.”

Scroggins shares her own research and hours of experience acquired while helping others through her work with the San Joaquin Valley Heritage & Genealogy Center, a collaboration between the Fresno County Genealogical Society and the Fresno County Public Library.

The Heritage Center, a subsection of the Fresno County Library, is closer to a special collection than a library, according to James Tyner, the principal librarian over support services. Tyner is also Fresno’s first poet laureate.

The collection includes physical documents, such as phone books, cemetery logs, property records, and how-to books. Especially interesting to many, Tyner said, are the high school yearbooks collected by the library.

Though many visitors expect the library to offer mostly physical books and resources on genealogy, the Heritage Center also offers its visitors access to Ancestry, the world’s largest collection of genealogical records.

“We’re currently working towards digitizing many of our collections,” Tyner said. 

Materials, physical or online, provide firm foundations to genealogical searches — but one benefit of exploring the Heritage Center is picking the brains of genealogical experts, such as Scroggins, and special collections coordinator Ariella Mason.

“I started working with a high school girl when I first started here over twenty years ago,” said Scroggins. “Hers [was] an African American family which can be very difficult,” said Mason. “During slavery, there’s no records, practically.” 

Scroggins, who was relatively new to genealogy at that point, said she and the young woman learned together. “She’d come in and we’d sit down on the computer… we’d look for census records, get to a stopping point, and then do more digging.” 

The work paid off, though, when the young woman came back last year and told Scroggins she had successfully traced her ancestry all the way back to 1619. “I had goosebumps, she had goosebumps, we both teared up… it was just one of those full circle things,” Scroggins said. The girl’s family managed to reclaim land they owned in Oklahoma through genealogical research. 

“Genealogy is very interesting and can mean a lot to people,” said Corky Peterson, vice president of the Fresno Genealogical Society.

The group has roots in different areas, but comes together to research their histories. “We have a lot of books that were put in the library, and, at one point with Measure B, the library had money to spend on books so they bought ‘big-ticket’ genealogy books.”

Peterson also said that the Daughters of the American Revolution moved their state library from Glendora to Fresno in 2009, as the location in Glendora was difficult to reach. “They opted to donate all their books up here, and they had early records from New England all the way up to the South.” Peterson did specify that the DAR currently does not have anything to do with the Heritage Center, other than their large donation of books.  

The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia have also worked with the Heritage center, and when the Heritage Center’s materials cannot help answer genealogical questions, they redirect visitors to FamilySearch, a non-profit genealogy library and organization run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Tyner said that the Fresno Public Library is slowly but surely attempting to digitize all the documents and materials which can be digitized. Though the Heritage Center was looking to digitize prior to the recently announced renovations to the downtown library, the renovations have caused the Heritage Center to shift to an “appointment only” basis for its visitors. 

Tyner also alluded to hoping that the Heritage Center, which is funded by Measure B, someday expands and gets its own space. “We’re getting more people coming in,” said Tyner. Tyner is especially excited seeing younger students coming in, asking for help with school projects or even simply researching their own genealogy.