MONROE — Town records existing as far back as about 1850 still exist, in varying degrees of completeness and condition. Forgotten, they are relegated to storage in the back corners of unused areas, and deteriorate.
Members of the Green County Genealogical Society have been contacting Town boards starting about 8 years ago, asking for access to these historical records to preserve that information. Teams of GCGS volunteers have scanned records from the earliest up to about 1940. Later records are not available to the public because of privacy statutes.
Thousand of pages are slowly scanned and saved to a computer. This is a herculean task requiring many days of work for many volunteers. That is just the beginning, because the larger part of the project still remains to be done.
These pages of documents are frequently in a deteriorated condition and barely readable. Once in the computer, each image is cropped and enhanced for maximum clarity, so names and other information can be added to a database for later research by interested parties.
GCGS is making this computer based information available to participating Towns, at no cost. Volunteers also use the information in the GCGS Research Center to assist researchers seeking information about their pioneer relatives. By identifying a name and page number, the actual historical document of individuals can be seen and read.
Back in the early county history, everything was counted for tax purposes. Every item of a farmer’s equipment, every head of animals, every major household item, Items bought and sold, were all recorded so that the government could benefit from the farmers efforts.
Imagine discovering that in 1920, your Great-Great-Grandfather, John raised a family while working a farm of 40 acres and owned three horses, had two wagons, milked six cows, had 15 chickens, had two watches, and even had a piano in the house. What a joy discovering what your relatives went through to get you where you are today.
The Town of Cadiz was the first town in Green County provided with a complete set of records images and searchable database. A few years ago the complete database was presented to Town of Jordan, and recently, after over 800 hours of data entry by one of GCGS’s volunteers, a complete database was presented to the Town of Monroe. This information may be available from the individual Town Clerks, subject to permission and available time resources.
It will be available every Tuesday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Green County Genealogical Society Research Center in the lower level of the Monroe Public Library.
Currently information from Towns of Spring Grove and Adams are in varying degrees of completeness. Other Green County towns may be done in the future, if requested, but this is a many years project.
