If you want to know about your genealogy, the Family History Center is a great place to find it. The dedicated volunteers love what they do — gathering information on the residents of Shawano and Menominee counties.
The center is located in a library at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Shawano. The church is not part of the center, and anyone is invited to do their research there.
Cathe Ziereis said the center’s mission is “to preserve local history of families genealogy and to help people who are looking for that.”
The center includes 90,000 obituaries. Jeanette Rekow is translating the German obits.
“I have about five years to go,” she said.
The center also has birth, marriage and death records alphabetized and categorized. The center shares the information with the Shawano County Historical Society and the Shawano City-County Library.
Anita Perez has been helping for 10 years and specializes in Native American veterans. She has also researched her own family.
“I learned a whole lot,” Perez said.
Right now they putting veterans information in books by when the veterans served.
“Anyone who is military is being put in appropriate books,” Ziereis said. “We pick a project and go with it. The veterans are important.”
The Civil War veterans were easy because information was readily available. The more recent information is more difficult because of privacy laws.
The volunteers often go above and beyond collecting information. This year, they went to Woodlawn Cemetery just before Memorial Day and took pictures of every veteran’s headstone, coming up with around 1,200 names.
“We did a lot of research in a short time,” Ziereis said.
The women wanted to be sure every veteran got a flag on their grave for the holiday. The flags are provided courtesy of Qualheim’s True Value, which started the Memorial Day tradition.
In late winter and early spring, the center holds five-week classes through Shawano Community Education to help people with their research.
“People don’t know where to start,” Ziereis said.
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