The following excerpt is from a long article by Claudia Boyd-Barrett, published in the January 3, 2010 edition of the Toledo Blade.
[Toledo, Ohio]: Inside the expansive rooms of the Dale-Riggs Funeral Home at Nebraska and City
Park avenues, tucked away in old boxes, filing cabinets, and on dusty basement shelves, there lies a veritable Toledo treasure.
Records — thousands of them, written in ledgers, typed on index cards, and stored in paper files — document the names, family ties, and biographical information of each person who has passed through the traditionally African-American funeral home since 1912.
…
Now, Ms. Riggs is working on making these voluminous records available to the public.
Together with the African American Legacy Project of Northwest Ohio — an organization dedicated to education about the history and culture of African Americans in the area — the funeral director hopes to raise enough money to create a computer database that would house all of the information in digital form.
The idea is to set up a site at the Legacy Project’s offices on Upton Avenue where researchers could look at the data and to make the records accessible online.
Click here for a history of the Dale-Riggs Funeral Home.
