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  #1  
Old 09-17-2021, 05:24 PM
naraht naraht is offline
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Location: Rockville,MD,USA
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How much biographical research on your Founders?

Just curious, for the founders of your fraternity/sorority, how much biographical information has been acquired by your fraternity/sorority for the widespread knowledge of the members.

For example, are the following included.
1) Their Religion
2) What companies they worked for during their lives
3) The name of their spouses (and with that whether they were married)
4) Birth location and date
5) Death location and date.
6) Burial location.
7) Education (including schools attended for Graduate work)

Just trying to figure out, how much is too much information to try to gather on the Alpha Phi Omega founders as we approach our 100th anniversary.

We have a founder that died in WWII, and we have conflicting information as to whether he died in North Africa, or during an evacuation to Britain. Sources differ by as much as two weeks...
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  #2  
Old 09-17-2021, 07:22 PM
Titchou Titchou is offline
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Delta Gamma's founding and the subsequent years are well documented. The Founders were from the same small MS town and attended the same girls' school in Oxford. All 3 eventually returned to their hometown and are buried locally. There is a Founders Room in the local Presbyterian Church which they attended. So our history is there for all to see - since December 1873.
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  #3  
Old 09-17-2021, 08:57 PM
UVASquirrel UVASquirrel is offline
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The information we have on our website about our founders is somewhat basic, but I am sure there is much more in the archives at our headquarters. Of course, Emily Helen Butterfield was a pretty famous architect in her day, so a lot is more publicly available about her.
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  #4  
Old 09-18-2021, 10:54 PM
AGDee AGDee is offline
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Location: Michigan
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Quote:
Originally Posted by naraht View Post
Just curious, for the founders of your fraternity/sorority, how much biographical information has been acquired by your fraternity/sorority for the widespread knowledge of the members.

For example, are the following included.
1) Their Religion
2) What companies they worked for during their lives
3) The name of their spouses (and with that whether they were married)
4) Birth location and date
5) Death location and date.
6) Burial location.
7) Education (including schools attended for Graduate work)

Just trying to figure out, how much is too much information to try to gather on the Alpha Phi Omega founders as we approach our 100th anniversary.

We have a founder that died in WWII, and we have conflicting information as to whether he died in North Africa, or during an evacuation to Britain. Sources differ by as much as two weeks...
We do have the information about where each is buried. For our 100th anniversary, medallions were placed on each headstone to indicate that they were a founder of Alpha Gamma Delta. A ceremony was held. I was local to one of them, Emily Helen Butterfield, mentioned above. There is a ton of information about her in Michigan. She is in the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame for being the first licensed female architect. She was admitted to that hall of fame when I was an advisor to my chapter and Alpha Gams from all over the state attended the reception and induction in Lansing. It was an incredible experience. She also studied Heraldry, wrote a book about it and was consulted in the creation of coats of arms for several fraternities and sororities.

We know which were married because of the naming convention we follow - First Name, Maiden Name, Married Name (and we keep adding on Married names when applicable) One of our Founders was Jennie Titus Smith Morris (two marriages). Emily Helen Butterfield never married. I'm sure our archives have the birth date and probably the location too. I don't recall hearing information about religion or education after their degrees at Syracuse.
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  #5  
Old 09-19-2021, 02:02 PM
RahRah241 RahRah241 is offline
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Join Date: Sep 2021
Location: Norfolk, Virginia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by naraht View Post
Just curious, for the founders of your fraternity/sorority, how much biographical information has been acquired by your fraternity/sorority for the widespread knowledge of the members.

For example, are the following included.
1) Their Religion
2) What companies they worked for during their lives
3) The name of their spouses (and with that whether they were married)
4) Birth location and date
5) Death location and date.
6) Burial location.
7) Education (including schools attended for Graduate work)

Just trying to figure out, how much is too much information to try to gather on the Alpha Phi Omega founders as we approach our 100th anniversary.

We have a founder that died in WWII, and we have conflicting information as to whether he died in North Africa, or during an evacuation to Britain. Sources differ by as much as two weeks...
For Theta Tau's four founders, we have the year most of them were born, the year they all died, the names of one of the founder's spouses, I was able to find two of the founders on find a grave, and we know where all the founders went to school. I don't think we know the religion of any of them.
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  #6  
Old 09-19-2021, 02:24 PM
Cheerio Cheerio is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by naraht View Post
Just curious, for the founders of your fraternity/sorority, how much biographical information has been acquired by your fraternity/sorority for the widespread knowledge of the members.

For example, are the following included.
1) Their Religion
2) What companies they worked for during their lives
3) The name of their spouses (and with that whether they were married)
4) Birth location and date
5) Death location and date.
6) Burial location.
7) Education (including schools attended for Graduate work)

Just trying to figure out, how much is too much information to try to gather on the Alpha Phi Omega founders as we approach our 100th anniversary.

We have a founder that died in WWII, and we have conflicting information as to whether he died in North Africa, or during an evacuation to Britain. Sources differ by as much as two weeks...
Congratulations on your foresight to discover, and document, the history of the founding members of Alpha Phi Omega.

What type of questions about your founders, which seem to never have answers, are asked most frequently by your members? That may be where your first threads of inquiry begin, with what your membership desires to know.

The amount of information you choose to discover and disseminate also depends on the time you personally have to investigate, as well as the number of founders. Are you making this your full-time hobby for the next several years, or devoting only a few weekly hours to the task? Your answer will help you plan the number of questions you can logically manage to investigate.

ANY information you can gather will be of SOME use to your initiates.

When and how you present all, or some of, the information you gather to other members will be judiciously decided by you.

Our organization enjoys the good fortune of founders who began keeping a history from the start. It includes answers to all the questions you ask in your OP.

Some of our historical information is presented to new members before they initiate, some in appropriate training manuals for members. General info about our founders is shown on multiple public websites.

Over the years, we've published several history books which are made available for purchase by, and perusal of, all members. These volumes have also been given to some campus libraries where we have/desire to have chapters. Common sharing of history volumes among NPC/IFC groups upon publication is known.

The deepest information regarding our founders is archived at our headquarters, and members with questions have been known to get answers to tough and infrequently asked questions by contacting their office.
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  #7  
Old 09-19-2021, 11:22 PM
naraht naraht is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Rockville,MD,USA
Posts: 3,502
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cheerio View Post
Congratulations on your foresight to discover, and document, the history of the founding members of Alpha Phi Omega.

What type of questions about your founders, which seem to never have answers, are asked most frequently by your members? That may be where your first threads of inquiry begin, with what your membership desires to know.

The amount of information you choose to discover and disseminate also depends on the time you personally have to investigate, as well as the number of founders. Are you making this your full-time hobby for the next several years, or devoting only a few weekly hours to the task? Your answer will help you plan the number of questions you can logically manage to investigate.

ANY information you can gather will be of SOME use to your initiates.

When and how you present all, or some of, the information you gather to other members will be judiciously decided by you.

Our organization enjoys the good fortune of founders who began keeping a history from the start. It includes answers to all the questions you ask in your OP.

Some of our historical information is presented to new members before they initiate, some in appropriate training manuals for members. General info about our founders is shown on multiple public websites.

Over the years, we've published several history books which are made available for purchase by, and perusal of, all members. These volumes have also been given to some campus libraries where we have/desire to have chapters. Common sharing of history volumes among NPC/IFC groups upon publication is known.

The deepest information regarding our founders is archived at our headquarters, and members with questions have been known to get answers to tough and infrequently asked questions by contacting their office.
As a note, Alpha Phi Omega will turn 100 in December 2025 and I've been working on this research on and off for over 5 years.

For Alpha Phi Omega, there is sort of a split, with the brothers and sisters of Alpha Phi Omega of the Philippines being more interested in general than those in the United States.


Burial places is a big thing, but I'm sort of hesitant to publicize that information since it is an incomplete set. We have 14 student founders, I've located actual graves for 10, 1 died (body unrecovered, we have a veteran trying to track down better records) in World War II (so on a wall in a Military Cemetary in the UK, 1 who was buried *somewhere* on Barbados (inoperable cancer and basically went there to die) and 2 that I don't much information on at all.

I have far more than is in our pledge manual (or the national history book published in 1993)

I have birth date for all, Which social fraternity they were in (Alpha Phi Omega is non-exclusive with the socials), degrees achieved, what most of them did for a living, Wife's name for more than half, death date for all (thank you Social Security Death Index)

Information on the 6 Advisors is actually somewhat easier to come by (college faculty are generally notable enough that more information is kept). I also have found the biographical directory of all alumni from the school from 23 years after the original chartering, so if they stayed in contact with the school at all, I have pretty good biographies up that point. (oddly enough edited by one of the founding advisors) https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?...eq=7&skin=2021

Work that I've put together as a spreadsheet is at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing
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