County Map

County List

Libraries

Provide a snail mail address to your local or regional libraries, along with a phone number, fax number, email address, and web site if possible. Anything special such as an exceptional genealogical section, lookup services, etc. would be terrific things to add.

Ask for volunteers. If they own the publication, they can perform lookups without violating copyright laws. Until you have a few folks performing lookups, there are sites that offer FREE lookups from CDs: Ancestral Findings, Genealogical FTM CDs, and World Family Tree CDs. There are also sites devoted to books... Books We Own is one.

Add some scanned maps of your county, or add a link to a map of your county generated by the U.S. Census’ Tiger Mapping Service. Another free mapping service with attractive maps is Microsoft’s Expedia. These maps can be freely linked to, or you can download them to your site. Check Expedia’s acceptable use policy since there are some limitations. Don’t forget to look at the WIGenWeb Maps & Gazetteers page, and the U.S. Digital Map Library for Wisconsin maps.

Provide a list of military units/regiments that served from your county. Include links to them if they are on-line. Check out the WI Military Page for the links we have found.

• Links for local Chambers of Commerce
• Photographs of local historical points of interest or notables
• Local Government Information
• Local Weather Stickers (kind of fun) ~ two sources are Weather Underground or Weather.com

Neighboring Counties

It is very helpful to researchers and a courtesy to other County Coordinators to include links to all the counties that surround your county. If neighboring counties are in another state, it is helpful to link to that state’s page.

Add links to individual researcher’s genealogical websites that have connections to your county. You can quickly add some by doing a search at Infoseek on "+county name" +Wisconsin +Genealogy. As time goes by, folks will email you asking you to add their site.

You can obtain a list of some schools in your county from the USGS Geographic Name Information System. Later, links, records and transcriptions can be added as data is received. Consider submitting school data to the WIGenWeb Archives for permanent storage. If you are interested in this alternative, review the Archives Guidelines for archiving data. Here are some Wisconsin Universities & Colleges.

Tip: A local phone book will help you out with finding current schools.

A surname list was extremely helpful when in the past all queries were maintained manually. Unforunately, it was very time consuming for the CC. Due to the advanced auto-query and surname search engines now available, this feature is no longer necessary although you may decide to use it anyway.

County Coordinators are often asked for help in research by surname. There are many sites on the internet, so we have made a list of a few of them as a tool for individual researchers and County Coordinators alike.