Wisconsin Local History and Biography Articles
This article originally appeared in Exchange,
a newsletter published by the Wisconsin Historical
Society.
(Volume 43, Number 4, 2001). It is the 21st
in a series of articles titled Researching
Community History. The series highlights
the Society's resources available to local
historians. It was written by Tom McKay,
retired local history coordinator for the
Wisconsin Historical Society.
Between 1860 and 1940 staff members of the
Wisconsin Historical Society clipped
thousands of articles containing local history
information from Wisconsin newspapers. The
Society has maintained this collection of clippings
as a resource for researchers who visit the
historical library in Madison. Now researchers
in all parts of Wisconsin and beyond can access
this collection on the Wisconsin Historical
Society web site. From a home computer with
internet access or a terminal in a school or
library, students and local historians engaged
in community history research have a valuable
collection of information at their fingertips.
The Wisconsin Local History and Biography Articles
(WLHBA) collection consists of more than 16,000
newsclippings on an extremely wide range of
local topics.
To mount the WLHBA collection on its web site, the Wisconsin Historical Society created digital reproductions of the original clippings. The Society produced a database that allows the clippings to be searched by people's names, community names, broad subject headings, and keywords from headlines. A successful search in the collection can bring a reproduction of the original article to the computer screen. The researcher can read the article from the computer or print out a copy.
Wisconsin Local History and Bibliography Articles
A search of the 16,000 local history newspaper clippings begins by accessing the Wisconsin Historical Society web site. Entering WLHBA will take a researcher directly to the collection. The web page that appears on the screen provides a basic introduction to the general scope, content and use of the collection. Researchers will find a wonderfully diverse number of subjects, from baseball to cheesemaking, represented in the collection. Clippings from southern Wisconsin predominate, but items are found from all parts of the state.
Basic Search Options
The web page offers basic search and advanced search options. The basic search option provides a space to enter a keyword on which to conduct a search. The keyword is required in a basic search and can find last names, subject terms and keywords from headlines contained in the 16,000 newsclippings. Entering the keyword "cheese" located eleven articles in the collection. The articles ranged in date from 1915 to 1941.
The basic search also includes a space to enter a location, although the location is not required to conduct a search. Entering "Green" in the location space and "cheese" in the keyword space narrowed the list of clippings to six articles about cheesemaking in Green County. Entering "Green County" and "cheese" produced no list of articles because the database is constructed to recognize only the unique name "Green" and not the repeated word "County" in the counties field. Consequently, the correct entry in the location space for Green County is "Green," for Calumet County is "Calumet," etc. For cities and villages, a researcher enters the full name of the city such as "Milwaukee," "Fort Atkinson," or "Glenwood City." The basic search option will not search on a location alone.
Advanced Search Options
Many researchers will find the advanced search option of the web page more helpful and easier to use than the basic option. The advanced search does allow a search by location alone. The advanced search page includes a list of all seventy-two counties in Wisconsin, and clicking on a county name brings up clippings that refer directly to that county. Searching on Trempealeau County produced a list of 34 clippings including a 1923 article about Aunt Nancy Olson of Osseo who, at the age of 104, had a ride in an automobile, saw a movie, and enjoyed her first radio.
The advanced search also allows a search by city or village. The researcher must type the name of the city or village desired in the space provided. A search for Boscobel stories produced six clippings from the Boscobel Dial-Enterprise . One clipping reported the laying of the cornerstone for the St. Paul's Lutheran Church in 1913. Another story from 1907 offered interesting details about the operation of the Wisconsin River ferry by Hiram Comstock in the 1850s.
The advanced search option offers a list of hundreds of newspapers represented by clippings in the WLHBA collection. Selecting the Juneau County Chronicle and clicking on the search box produced only two clippings. However, one was an article that reprinted the World War I diary of Gaylord Bradley. Mr. Bradley played in an army band. Eventually he was stationed in Europe and killed during the war. The article reprinting his diary contains remarkable details from the daily life of a World War I soldier.
While the newspaper list is useful to local historians, searching by village or city name can turn up articles that might be missed by relying on the newspaper list alone. The newspaper list has no entries for the city of Amery, but a search conducted by entering Amery in the space provided for a city name revealed a lengthy, 1921 clipping promoting the advantages of Amery for agriculture and business. The article named local manufacturing concerns and businesses providing services to agriculture. The story contained several photographs including one of the Weaver Oil Company in its new portico-style, filling station. The original clipping came not from an Amery newspaper but from an article in the Superior Evening Telegram promoting Amery.
The advanced search option also provides the capability to conduct a search by personal name Entering the name of a well-known figure produces a predictably lengthy list of clippings. The collection includes 57 articles about William Dempster Hoard. Less prominent local leaders may not appear in any clippings. The database created for the WLHBA collection does not include every name of every person mentioned in the clippings. The names entered in the database are those of the people found to be most significant to the subject of the article. While a name search is not exhaustive, it can be a quick, first attempt to seek biographical information without reading lengthy articles.
Subject searches on keywords can produce clippings with surprising levels of historical detail. Searching on the word "school" created a list of 175 articles. Some are brief, but others such as a 1916 article from the Lodi Enterprise are packed with information. The clipping provided the name of the village's first teacher, Miss Mary Yockey; the location of the first log schoolhouse in the eastern part of the village; and dates for the establishment of a union school in 1864, a disastrous school fire in 1878, and the building of the first high school in 1898. The article even offered the names and places of residence of five people who attended the first log school in 1846 and remained alive in 1916.
A search on the keyword "baseball" retrieved far fewer entries than the search on "school," but a particularly interesting clipping recounted the early years of baseball in Baraboo. The story traced baseball's beginnings in Baraboo back to 1867. Anecdotes about the longest hitters, farthest throwers, and best runners of the era abound in the story written in 1925. The article tells of the introduction of fast pitching into the local game and treats rivalries with the baseball teams of other towns.
Each successful search of the WLHBA collection brings up a list of matches to the inquiry. The list gives the headline, month, day, year, county and city for each match found. This information appears in table form, and the last column in the table gives the option of viewing the digital reproduction of the original clipping. The researcher can click on the view column to bring up the article on the computer screen. The Wisconsin Local History and Biography Articles collection is one of several resources available on the Wisconsin Historical Society web site. The next article in this series will explore the Wisconsin Architecture and History Inventory. |
