Lois McCullough

Today, I attended the funeral at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Bellville for Lois (Robinson) McCullough, a longtime volunteer who joined the Ohio Genealogical Society back in 1961, just a few months short of getting the appellation of “OGS charter member”. Lois was born 4 Jan 1922 and died 20 Aug 2015, and in that time, reached many people through her work as an educator and historian. Her three books on one-room schoolhouses in Richland County will be perpetually valued by researchers. It was quickly obvious that she had outlined the funeral program in advance of her death probably utilizing scripture and songs from past funerals of her ancestors, so dear to her. The pastor, Rev. Douglas J. Pretorius, was asked to read a portion of the genealogical passages in Genesis – the ones with all the “begat” phrases linking father or mother to daughter or son. As a non-genealogist, he said he had skipped over this section of the Bible in divinity school, but added that Lois McCullough knew it well and had a story to go with each Biblical person named in this long list, just like she was the keeper of the stories of her own family. She was now gone but her life story and the story of those before her were now being passed down to us. We’ll now have to analyze the old membership records of the Ohio Genealogical Society to learn the names of our earliest members who are still current. We have lost our last three charter members, William Houston, Betty Reed, and Donna Urban and our members of 1961, Bob Cunning and Lois McCullough in just these last couple years. It is certainly something to lend fifty-five years of service to a group. Tom Neel, OGS Library Director