St. Louis Communities
The City of St. Louis consists of almost eighty neighborhoods that carry specific names based on their locations in the city. Many were first settled by particular ethnic groups, such as the Irish and the Germans, and as the city grew and changed, others have developed more recently. St. Louis County has sprawled in three directions around the city into more than one hundred villages and small cities.
A map and information about some of the St. Louis City neighborhoods is available here. Links on that page provide valuable details of twenty-seven of the neighborhoods in the city.
Learning about where your ancestors lived may help you determine where they worshiped, worked, went to school, and spent their free time. Many communities in St. Louis County have historical societies that have published books on their cities so you should look for them also, and many local authors have written about specific ethnic and religious groups in both the city and county.
StLGS has worked with some neighborhood groups to digitize and preserve records. We welcome other organizations to partner with us!
Click on each title below to expand the details and see the data.
Fenton
Fenton, Missouri, located in southwest St. Louis County, was populated by Native Americans long before white settlers arrived in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. Although not incorporated as a town until 1874, the growing village established a ferry crossing the Meramec River and a post office in 1833, and about twenty years later, a local group constructed a toll bridge across the river. The town increased in size as access improved, and by 1955, it was large enough to reincorporate as a fourth-class city with a mayor and other officials. At that time, the city expanded in size, annexing an additional 1,500 acres. Today, the city covers about five and a half square miles and supports more than 600 businesses.
Fenton has an active historical society that was founded in 1993 to preserve the history of their community. They established, refurbished, and continue to manage the Fenton History Museum, located in a home built in 1905. For more information on the society, check out their website.
Indexes to Some Historic Records from Fenton
In 2021, the members of the Olde Towne Fenton Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution began a project to index some of these collections. The indexes include prominent Fenton residents and families and were created by Donna Barnes, Lisa Barnes, Eleanor Gibson, Kathleen Givens (project leader), Mary Kinnaw, Diana Miller, Joyce Rea, and Nora Zimmer. For more information on the Olde Towne Fenton Chapter, see their website.
Both groups have agreed to share the indexes with StLGS, and we thank them for their generosity.
Surname Family Files, Miscellaneous Photos and Newspaper Clippings
Bound Collection of St. Louis and Jefferson County News, 1961–1983
Rock Hill
Rock Hill is one of many communities in mid-St. Louis county. It was populated very early, and by the mid-1850s, many prominent St. Louisans owned land there.
To learn more about these early landowners, see the Rock Hill Landowners page.
Webster Groves
The area that is today Webster Groves in St. Louis County was populated by the mid-nineteenth century. The Pacific Railroad’s inclusion of stops in Webster brought further growth, and by 1866, the community contained four churches, followed by a public school system two years later. Webster was incorporated as a city in 1896 and has continued to thrive.
The Webster Groves Historical Society (WGHS) incorporated in 1965, originally to save the historic Hawken House, which was under threat of demolition. In the intervening years, the group has been collecting historic records donated by individuals and/or discarded by government agencies. In 2020, WGHS entered into an agreement with StLGS to share some of its records. As the records are scanned and indexed, we will include them on our website.
We thank WGHS for their generosity and look forward to a long, fruitful partnership with them. For more information on WGHS, go to their website.
Webster Groves Historic Records
Births in Webster Groves, 1903–1909
Deaths in Webster Groves, 1903–1909
Last modified: 16-Sep-2025 11:24