Highlights Archives
Wisconsin County Histories Go Online
Society Director Lyman Copeland Draper noted in his 1882 annual report that, "One class of works has sprung into existence within the past few years that is becoming quite numerous — county histories." He acquired 24 for the Society library in 1878 and over the next six years the library received 350 more. For the next four decades, book-length histories of individual counties poured from commercial and private publishers.
County Histories a Unique Genre with One-of-a-Kind Content
In the end, more than 3,000 were published about 1,400 U.S. counties. Some counties received multiple treatments, but roughly half of American counties had nothing written about them at all. Wisconsin, with 72 counties, was documented by about 130 county histories; 12 Wisconsin counties had no comprehensive history written.
County histories were a unique genre, not unlike the fat, two-volume biographies that embalmed many Victorian worthies during the same decades. "Though generally prepared with too much haste," Draper continued, "yet it must be said to their credit that they snatch many a fragment of local history and genealogy from neglectfulness and add not a little to the general sum of local historical literature. We are taking much pains to secure copies of these county histories for unless secured on their issue it is difficult to obtain them."
Scope and Significance of the Collection
The Society recently put more than 80 of these works online in their entirety at www.wisconsinhistory.org/wch/. The collection totals about 56,000 pages and is being enthusiastically welcomed by genealogists, local historians, archivists and public librarians around the state. The books typically contain several hundred pages filled with pioneer recollections, biographical sketches and other local data that was not recorded anywhere else.
Users can easily browse the online collection by county and read the full text of any book that interests them. Chapters that focus on a particular city, village or township appear on a similar list, so readers can jump directly to histories of communities as large as Milwaukee or as small as Merritt's Landing ("a hamlet of 25 inhabitants in the town of Moundville, 12 miles southwest of Montello," in Marquette County).
Because every word on every page is indexed, researchers can easily uncover facts about specific people, places, events and topics with a text search. Every book can also be downloaded for free in PDF format for easy printing and preservation.
Books whose short biographies are included in the Wisconsin Genealogical Index will be linked there so genealogists can read them without having to order and wait for paper copies. As resources permit, the collection will be expanded to include every Wisconsin county by adding unpublished histories and other works outside the "standard county history" genre.
Just the Latest Online Research Collection
The Wisconsin County Histories collection joins other basic research collections on our state's heritage. All of these are available for free here at wisconsinhistory.org:
:: Posted August 13, 2009
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