Macoupin County, Illinois, probably isn't on your radar. It wasn't on mine either, until I started clicking around Macoupin County ILGenWeb, a sprawling, hand-built genealogy and history site that's been maintained by volunteers since 1996. And once I started clicking, I couldn't stop.
The site is part of the larger USGenWeb and ILGenWeb projects, which are networks of free, volunteer-run county genealogy sites. Macoupin County's corner of that network is remarkably deep. There are cemetery listings (dozens and dozens of them, from tiny family plots on farmland to city cemeteries, each with notes about condition and location), census records, church histories, land records, obituary indexes, and a detailed Places page that reads like an encyclopedia of forgotten hamlets. I learned that Benld, Illinois was named by mashing together the first name, middle initial, and last initial of Benjamin L. Dorsey, the guy who helped get the coal rights. That kind of specificity is everywhere on this site.
But what really pulled me in was the coal mining section. Macoupin County's history is inseparable from coal, and the site treats this with the seriousness it deserves. There's a full listing of mines organized by township, with owner names, mine names, and years of operation. There are personal memories contributed by people like Larry Clark, who remembered his father hauling coal from the Little Dog Mine in East Gillespie and fishing in the old mine ponds after the operations closed. There's a heartbreaking 1893 newspaper account from the Mt. Olive Herald about Henry Schultze, a loader at Consolidated Coal Company Mine No. 8, who was crushed by a falling rock. The article describes how his partner returned to find only an elbow protruding from beneath the stone, the saw still in his hand. The reporter noted that Schultze "was 33 years age, and leaves a wife and two small children, whose means are limited."
Then there's the Virden Mine Riot of 1898, which gets extensive coverage. The site includes two long historical essays by Victor Hicken (a history professor at Western Illinois University who, the site notes, was part of the original assault force on Omaha Beach on D-Day). It also has transcriptions of local newspaper coverage from the Macoupin County Enquirer, reporting day by day as thousands of union miners flooded into Virden to prevent the mine company from bringing in strikebreakers from Alabama. The detail is incredible. You can read about miners walking all night from Gillespie to Carlinville to spread the warning. You can read about the company hiring Chicago ex-policemen as armed guards and building a stockade around the mine. There's even a reproduction of the recruiting flyer that was posted in Birmingham, Alabama, calling for workers to come to Virden. And there's a photo of the O'Neill House where the union miners gathered, with a note about the old lady who made coffee and food for them, shown in the picture with her little dog.
The site itself looks exactly like what it is: a no-frills HTML site built to share information, not to impress. Navigation is simple. The pages load instantly. There's a FreeFind search box. The footer credits the USGenWeb Project and notes the last update date (July 2026, so it's still actively maintained). The What's New page is a running log of contributions going back years, each one thanked by name. "Thanks to Teri Barnett, corrected info." "Thanks to Jean Jung, added obituary." "Thanks to Shelley Cardiel, added MILLER family photos." You can see the community of contributors keeping this thing alive, one obituary, one cemetery listing, one family photo at a time.
The site is dedicated in honor of Gloria Frazier, who passed away in 2019, "for her many years of dedication to Macoupin County genealogy and the ILGenWeb Project." The current co-coordinators are Julie Close and Norma Hass. These are real people doing real preservation work, for free, because they care about a place and the people who lived there.
Even if you have zero connection to Macoupin County, spend twenty minutes on this site. Read the mine riot coverage. Browse the cemetery listings with their little notes about overgrown plots on someone's pasture land. Look at the old photographs. It's a whole county's memory, assembled by hand and given away to anyone who wants it.