We are a mid-sized genealogical society located in Union Gap, Washington, a small town situated adjacent to the City of Yakima and nestled in the Eastern foothills of the Cascade Mountains. Our society focuses on serving the people of Yakima County, a county with a diverse population of about 295,000 people, a diverse landscape and a rich cultural heritage. This area is the top producer of agricultural products in Washington State. The upper and lower Yakima Valleys produce 75% of the country’s hops and 75% of the country’s supply of mint oil. It is also the largest grower of apples in the nation. With 65 wineries in the county, many of them award winning, we now rival the Napa Valley with the amount and quality of our wines. The landscape varies from rich agricultural valleys to heavily wooded mountains of the Cascade range to the peak of Mt. Adams. Our county is home to the Yakama Nation and their reservation of 1,130,000 acres. The reservation stretches from the valley floor to the slopes of Mt. Adams. The county is a top recreation area in the state with numerous opportunities for skiing, hiking, fishing, hunting, camping and tubing. With 300 days a year of sunshine, we enjoy more sunny days than any other locality in the state.
Our society was formed in 1968 and has grown continually over the years. It is now one of the larger and more active societies in Washington state. We offer a full range of services to the community including seminars, workshops, user groups and classes. In addition, we operate a genealogical library open to the public free of charge and staffed by trained volunteers. With our very large collection of books, microfilm and microfiche, we currently have about 44,000 titles in our combined collection, making us one of the largest genealogical libraries in the Pacific Northwest. We also provide free access to Ancestry and several other websites. We are an affiliate library of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, allowing us to view thousands of digitized records located on their website that are not available to home users. Ongoing record extraction programs have allowed us to amass a huge collection of digitized cemetery records, funeral home records and obituaries. These records and a number of others like them are available on the computers at the library. For those who are not able to come to the library in person, we are able to provide digital copies of these records. Indexes for these record are available here, on our website.
If you live in the area, we invite you to come and visit our facility. Let us help you with your research. If you are located outside the area and are traveling through Washington, you may find it very worthwhile and enriching to plan on spending a day with us as you travel through.
