Family History Institute

Family History Institute (FHI) 2025

The Wythe County Genealogical and Historical Association (WCGHA) will host its Twenty-Eighth Family History Institute on Saturday, 5 April, 2025. This day-long affair will be held at the Wytheville Meeting Center.  The purpose of the day is to provide information of interest to genealogists, historians, authors, and researchers. This year, we have chosen to dive into some new areas of interest.

On Friday, 4 April 2025, from 3:00 to 5:00 PM, there will be a workshop (maximum 15 people). The workshop will include a short talk on the kinds of records found in the typical courthouse, followed by a guided tour of the Records areas at the Wythe County Courthouse.

Our lead speaker for the 2025 conference is William A. Veselik. Bill is the Archivist for the F.B. Kegley Library at Wytheville Community College (WCC) and the regional representative of Family Search. (After years of talks from Anne Mitchell, a representative of Ancestry, we thought it was time to give the opposition a chance!)

Our second speaker, is Dr. Daniel B. Thorp, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech. He is the author of nearly two dozen articles and three books on a range of topics in eighteenth and nineteenth-century American history. His two presentations on African American history will introduce us to another under-represented parts of our history.

Bennett Cassell is a native of Wythe County and a Retired Professor of Dairy Science at VA Tech. Since most of our ancestors were farmers, it’s time we learned more about their history.

Patricia Austin is President of the Board of the Wytheville Training Center and African-American Museum.

Our banquet speaker is Ricky Cox, a retired professor of American literature and Appalachian Studies at Radford. He was our speaker a few years ago, and we are yielding to the many requests we received to have him back

Friday afternoon, April 5th, we are having a Courthouse Research Workshop (capacity 15) at our 11th Street offices. In a short talk we will review the types of records to be found in most courthouses. Then we will visit the office of the Clerk of the Wythe County Circuit Court, for a tour of the records room and the basement record storage area. If most of your personal family research has been done on-line, this is your chance to learn how access records that may not be on line at all.

For those people coming from out of town, we recommend you book your lodging early. We will be having an optional get together for out-of-town visitors the night before the conference (Friday, April 4, 2025), to give everyone a chance to talk with old acquaintances and with WCGHA volunteers. If you are interested, contact us by phone or e-mail.