Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck Inducted into the National Genealogy Hall of Fame
by Tony Hanson
Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck has been selected by the National Genealogical Society to be inducted into the National Genealogy Hall of Fame. This award honors outstanding genealogists whose achievements in American genealogy have had a great impact on the field and who have been deceased for at least five years. Their contributions to genealogy in this country need to be significant in a way that was unique, pioneering, or exemplary. Entries are judged by a panel of genealogists from various parts of the United States.
Bockstruck was born on 26 May 1945 in Vandalia, Fayette County, Illinois; he died on 23 May 2018 in Dallas, Texas. With a thirty-year tenure as supervisor of the Genealogy Section (1979-2009) at the Dallas Public Library, he established the library’s reputation as a leading genealogical collection in the United States—including records not widely available—with more than 100,000 books, over 40,000 rolls of microfilm, and nearly 20,000 microfiche. He compiled over fifty bibliographies covering various subjects including colonial Germans, church records, Hoosier genealogy, land memorials, military and pension records, probate records, Virginia Baptists, and many more.
Between 1976 and 2017, he authored ten genealogical reference books and monographs. He served for eleven years on the faculty of the Genealogical Institute of Mid-America, University of Illinois at Springfield (1994-2005); seventeen years as a weekly columnist for the Dallas Morning News (1991-2008); seventeen years as an instructor at the School of Continuing Education, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas (1974-1991), and thirty-nine years on the faculty of the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research (IGHR) at Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama (1974-2013). Bockstruck lectured throughout the country at genealogical society workshops, seminars, and conferences, influencing several generations of genealogists, family historians, and librarians. His honors include being named a Fellow of the National Genealogical Society (1992), receiving the initial Filby Prize for Genealogical Librarianship (1999), and being named a Fellow of the Texas State Genealogical Society (2008).
When he died in 2018, Lloyd left his genealogy papers to the Dallas Genealogical Society. Society members digitized the collection and have made them available at https://dallasgenealogy.org/bockstruck-papers/.
