Maggie Steele is a genealogical Sherlock Holmes.

She’s digging out mysteries more than a century old in a unique project of the Pikes Peak Genealogical Society and Pikes Peak Library District.

Steele, 83, and other volunteers are indexing about 1,025 pages of the first four St. Francis Hospital patient admission registers. The material includes more than 18,000 names of patients who were admitted between September 1887 and July 1915.

The work promises to help genealogists find long-lost ancestors and give medical historians and other researchers a snapshot of the early Pikes Peak region.

It’s a fascinating array of details: name, age, sex, marital status, religion, ethnicity, occupation, employer, address, diagnosis, admission date and discharge or death date.

A bonus for genealogists looking for family ties comes via the emergency contacts listed, often next of kin.

The indexing project will take at least two years to finish, depending on how many volunteers take part. So far, 10 volunteers are working. But the society is inviting both experienced and inexperienced indexers to help. “The more, the merrier,” said Suzanne Mulligan, a genealogy society member heading the project.

As it’s completed, the information is being placed online at PPLD’s Pikes Peak NewsFinder Index, where it can be accessed for free.

“We are thrilled to have the Pikes Peak Genealogical Society work with us on the project,” said Dennis Daily, until recently PPLD liaison to the society. “The information is invaluable. It’s an incredible amount of information. Without volunteer help, the library couldn’t undertake such a large effort,” he said.

Records saved, digitized

Indexing projects are ongoing across the U.S. as genealogists rescue and digitize records.

There is certainly demand. Genealogy is the second most popular hobby in the country after gardening, according to Time magazine, and second only to pornography in the number of online searches.

The St. Francis patient information is important because many were railroad workers and laborers who worked in the Pikes Peak region and then moved on. These transients are not often found in censuses, landowner and tax rolls, and other documents on which genealogists rely.

The registers are part of the Penrose-St. Francis archive collection of 1887 to 2001, which includes more than 21 cubic feet worth of material and was given to the library several years ago, Daily said.

Under federal privacy laws, material more than 100 years old pertaining to patients can be made public, thus the project’s 1887-1915 parameter, noted Tim Blevins, head of PPLD Special Collections Division.

The registration books offer a snapshot of the initial years of St. Francis, the first hospital in Colorado Springs. It started as two small houses where Dr. Boswell P. Anderson, a physician with Colorado Midland Railroad, treated employees and others. (The railroad was the first standard gauge to go through Ute Pass to the Aspen silver mines, and created towns such as Cascade and Green Mountain Falls, according to the Pikes Peak Historical Society website.)

Anderson asked for help from the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration, which helped raise the money needed to build a hospital in 1888.

The patient registers show occupational accidents plagued railroad workers: smashed fingers, head injuries, dislocations, amputations, cuts, bruises.

The logs list a wide cross section of residents of the fledgling Colorado Springs community: ranch hands, stonemasons, telegraph operator, housewives, gardeners, lawyers, laborers and others.

A variety of ailments

Steele says she enjoys the indexing because of her nursing background. The patients suffered a variety of ailments, including some with old-fashioned names: rheumatism, nasal catarrh typhoid fever, Mountain Fever and simply “fevers.” Quite common was “phthisis,” also logged as consumption and tuberculosis. The disease was particularly common because the region was a destination for TB patients, who thought the dry climate would cure them.

It’s a laborious process to get all this information to the public. PPLD first had a company microfilm the pages and then library staff also scanned them.

“Scanning is good for access but lousy for their preservation,” Blevins explained.

Links to these digitized pages are distributed by email to the volunteers, who input the information on spreadsheets. The work is checked for quality and then imported into the library’s database so the public can access it.

Steele said the indexing will enable the public to search by a certain name instead of wading through countless amounts of information in a nonindexed database.

She knows how monotonous nonindexed databases can be. Over decades, she has traced her ancestors to the 16th century. It took her 16 years of occasional searching to find one long-lost relative.

‘It’s like a mystery’

Steele finds herself enjoyably sidetracked by information she is indexing. “It’s like a mystery,” she said.

One time, she came across a list of injured patients who were admitted together on June 29, 1890. Curious, she got help from the library special collections staff to find a Gazette article from two days later that reported a carriage and train had collided in Ute Pass near Cascade. One woman died at the scene and another at the hospital, and six others were treated.

Simply indexing a name often can lead to an interesting story such as that for family historians, Steele said. But deciphering old handwriting found in documents is sometimes a headache. Steele and other volunteers were given a handwriting guide for the elaborate Spencerian penmanship. In vogue from the mid-1800s until about 1925, it has many curlicues and hard-to-decipher t’s and f’s.

“After a while, you get the hang of it,” Steele said.

There are plenty of misspellings and phonetic spellings of names and places entered in the patient registers. And the volunteers dutifully record them the way they are on the pages.

However, the indexers also include possible correct spellings since that is likely how researchers will search.

Indexers work at their own pace, and Steele has completed 26 pages since the project started in June.

“I can’t garden like I used to so this is fun,” she said. “It’s not hard. They give me three pages and in no time, I’m saying, ‘Give me more pages; give me more.'”

Volunteers are indexing approximately 1,100 pages of the old St. Francis Hospital patient intake records, much from 100 years ago. The information is very valuable for genealogists who are looking for ancestors and includes names, and things like ethnicity, religion, diagnosis, next of kin, etc. The project is a joint effort between Pikes Peak Library District and Pikes Peak Genealogical Society. Suzanne Mulligan, ,who is heading the project for the Pikes Peak Genealogical Society, looks through one of the old record books with volunteer, 83-year-old Maggie Steele in Special Collections at the Penrose Library on Wednesday, August 3, 2016. photo by Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette

Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette

A photograph of a patient room and nurse at St. Francis Hospital. Unknown date and photographer. Courtesy of Penrose-St. Francis Hospital Collection, Special Collections, Pikes Peak Library District

Volunteers are indexing approximately 1,100 pages of the old St. Francis Hospital patient intake records, much from 100 years ago. The information is very valuable for genealogists who are looking for ancestors and includes names, and things like ethnicity, religion, diagnosis, next of kin, etc. The project is a joint effort between Pikes Peak Library District and Pikes Peak Genealogical Society. A page from the original registrar book shows some of the information to be gathered by the volunteers. photo by Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette

Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette