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1986–today
The managers: Dorothy M. Lower managed the genealogy department from 1961 to 1983. Michael B. Clegg succeeded her (1983–1987), and Curt B. Witcher became the department's third manager in 1987. Witcher — titled in recent years Director of Special Collections, and described in 2025 as a 45-year veteran of the library — has been the Genealogy Center's public face for nearly four decades.
PERSI: The Periodical Source Index was created in 1986 by Genealogy Center and ACPL Foundation staff, edited by Clegg and others, and funded by the Foundation's Christman Fund, built on a bequest of about 60,000 dollars. PERSI indexes genealogy and local-history periodicals by surname and place; its retrospective print set ran to sixteen volumes covering 1847–1985, annual volumes followed (the last print annual came in 1997), and the index came to cover more than 11,000 periodical titles, some 3,000 of them defunct. PERSI went online through Ancestry in 1997 and HeritageQuest, entered a partnership with Findmypast in 2013, and in 2022 the library made it free on its own website. Its size was put at 2.7 million entries in older sources and at more than 3.2 million entries in Witcher's recent handouts.
Sources:
- Slater-Putt, Beyond Books (1995), ch. 3 — the managers' succession and PERSI's initiation under Clegg.
- Histories of PERSI at FamilyLocket and GenealogyPants — the Christman Fund, the print run, the online partnerships and the 2022 free release.
- Curt B. Witcher, Genealogy Center handouts — the 3.2-million entry count.