Located at the Central Library, the Texana/Genealogy Department acquires, preserves and offers access to research materials relating to San Antonio, Bexar County and Texas history, and North American and Hispanic genealogy. Most of the funeral programs in the African-American Funeral Program Collection contain obituaries, including many that were not published in mainstream newspapers. If these programs are not preserved, the information that they contain, documenting people who lived in the black community, may be lost to history. This collection helps to preserve a genealogical resource for current and future generations, and depicts the African American community in Bexar County.

The collection began with a few individuals in the local community in 2005, donating programs they had collected from the funerals of friends, family and local community members. The collection began to grow as word spread through San Antonio’s African-American community. The information from the programs (name, date of funeral service, church, funeral home, cemetery and any notes of interest) are entered, by hand, by Library staff onto a spreadsheet. The Texana/Genealogy Department was able to secure funding to cover the cost of digitizing the programs, and coordinated with the University of North Texas to have them scanned.

The Portal to Texas History is helping to save the history of the African-American community. This is especially important as neighborhoods become gentrified, and memories of past residents fade away. The University of North Texas has said that this collection is one of the Portal’s most heavily used. There have been over 300,000 visitors to the collection since it first went online in 2012. This year the collection has averaged almost 13,500 visitors per month. This partnership with the University of North Texas allows access to the information contained in the funeral programs far beyond the San Antonio region.