This year we celebrate the 10th anniversary of The Squire Munro Project and the 140th anniversary of the Munro Family Genealogy work. On March 1, 2006 Mark Conway Munro started this project which was a reboot of the original genealogical efforts that began in October 1876 during the first Munro Reunion in Elbridge, NY. We would like to pause and reflect on the progress made in recent years and to encourage everyone in the family to contribute information or time to help our continuing efforts to chronicle our shared heritage.
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Back in 2006, we had a document containing about 500 known descendants of Squire Munro. These were largely from the original work performed between 1876 and 1900 at reunions along with additional work performed by various members of the family, down a couple of branches. Since then we have expanded this to include over 6,200 known descendants with ever improving source citations. And that number doesn’t include all the spouses who married into the family. This has become a truly staggering endeavor.
During the last several years since John Paul Munro joined the project in 2012, with the help of a handful of volunteers, we have transcribed one or more obituaries for over 2,200 people along with many marriage and other articles. In 2013, we release two free research collection documents. The first is Munro Reunions which contains transcriptions of the annual gathers of the Munro family in Elbridge and Onondaga County between 1876-1924. The second is the Complete Name Index for Mary Ellis Maxwell’s 1952 book Among the Hills of Camillus that will help people find where in the book their ancestors are mentioned.
In addition, we have collected far more information — articles, deeds, journals, letters and more — that are waiting for volunteers to help convert into text so that it can be searched, cataloged, compiled and further manipulated into a rich family record; and used as source material for a future book. We hope that in the coming years more people will join in to help transcribe and to help other distant cousins connect with us to help confirm information about the modern generations of their various branches for whom there is no public historical records available for us to review. For ideas about how you can help, visit our participation page. You can also help by sharing our I’m a Squire Munro Descendant page which gives an overview of the project to help your own immediate relatives discover their connection to the family and, hopefully, how to get involved.
Please remember that this project goes far beyond the name “Munro” and our focal person, Squire Munro. As of now there are over 1,000 different surnames involved in this project from all of the spouses marrying into the family.
As we continue work on the project, we have many exciting goals. We hope to add more content to the web site, including more artifacts like the recent addition of Munro family bibles. We hope to create a registration system that will allow relatives to sign up as an official “Squire Munro Descendant” to make it easier for us to keep in touch with everyone in the far branches of the family tree. We hope to put more and more data into collections and books that can be shared among family members and eventually write a comprehensive history of the family.
In the meantime, please keep in touch. If you haven’t corresponded with us lately, consider sending us a message to let us know how your family is doing and if you have any recent births or marriages to report. If you have found any boxes of old photos, letters or other genealogically relevant information that might be of interest to our project, please let us know. We love hearing from you!
Mark Conway Munro
John Paul Munro