New Paseo Verde Library to open on Saturday

Jeffrey Libby

Friday, Aug. 23, 2002 | 9:13 a.m.

Bob Kennard says if his dad's great grandfather shows up in the 1930 U.S. Census, which was released in its entirety in March, he should be able to trace his roots from Maryland farmland "clear back to Scotland."

Like the other 162 members of the Clark County, Nevada Genealogy Society, Kennard has been "poisoned," he says, by a love of family history and of mystery.

Starting Saturday, when the Paseo Verde Library opens in Henderson, volunteers from the society will help others learn how to dig their roots online and from microfiche at the state's only public library genealogy collection.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has four genealogy libraries in the Las Vegas Valley open to the public. But those libraries have more restricted operating hours and are privately funded, said Joan Kerschner, director of the Henderson Public Library District.

"We're going to be open 68 hours a week," Kerschner said of the $6.6 million, 42,000-square-foot facility at the southeast corner of Interstate 215 and Green Valley Parkway.

The new facility will also be the most high-tech public library in the state, Kerschner said, with videoconferencing capabilities and Internet hookups available throughout the book stacks.

The library also has specialized sections for pre-schoolers, young teens and a medical collection.

Ron Hughes, a retired Marine, said he'll spend his time at the new library online, researching his mother's father's side of the family. He just finished with his mother's mother's side of the family.

"It goes on forever," he said. "Sometimes, though, you find out things you don't want to know. I never have. But a lot of people have."

At a recent society meeting, Hughes said, a member passed around mugshots and Arizona prison records of relatives who did time for murder in the early 1900s.