By examining newspapers of the 1800s era through the present, volunteers and Marshfield, Wisconsin Public Library staff have created an award-winning archive that contains more than 234,000 records of people who live and have lived in the community.
"Old newspapers are full of information, but there isn't an index for them," said Don Schnitzler, an archive volunteer and member of the Marshfield Genealogy Group that first proposed the project to the library in 1982. "Usually, you need to look at a lot of newspapers to find a piece of information you need," he said. "But this online index of births, marriages and deaths makes family research a lot simpler."
The library recently won the Wisconsin Governor's Archival Achievement Award. The work of the library and local residents was commended "as a wonderful example of how a community can keep recording its own history in new ways," Gottlieb said Sunday.
You can read more about the database and the award in an article by Liz Welter in the Marshfield News-Herald at http://www.marshfieldnewsherald.com/article/20081104/MNH0101/811040406/1980.
The database is accessible at http://engagedpatrons.org/database/MPLGenealogy.
