Menominee County Wisconsin USGenWeb

Welcome to the Menominee County, Wisconsin Genealogy & Family History website -- part of the WIGenWeb Project. Since Menominee was part of Shawano County until 1961, some of the older records will be located in the Shawano site as well. This site is not to replace any official Menominee Tribal pages -- just an additional resource for history & genealogy and a place to share your research. Things that can be posted to this site, include:

BIRTH, MARRIAGE & DEATH RECORDS	BIOGRAPHIES	CEMETERY RECORDDS
CENSUS RECORDS	CHURCHES	FAMILY GROUP RECORDS
FAMILY HISTORIES	GAZETTEERS	LOCAL TOWN HISTORIES
MAPS	MILITARY RECORDS	NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS
OBITUARIES	PHOTOGRAPHS	RESEARCH LINKS
SCHOOL RECORDS	SURNAMES	VITAL RECORDS

OFFICIAL MENOMINEE TRIBAL PAGES

Also spelled Menomini, Menominee is derived from an Algonkian word —manomin—for “wild rice”. The French called the Monominee Folles Avoines—“the wild oats people”. The Menominee Reservation contains 235,000 acres of northeastern Wisconsin forest land, a small part of the area in which Menominees have lived for more than 5,000 years. The reservation is home to approximately 2,500 American Indians, over 2,000 of whom are enrolled Menominees. The Menominees originally occupied approximately 9.5 million acres of what is now Wisconsin and the upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Before European contact, the Menominee were a relatively small tribe on the northern shore of Lake Michigan. Conservative estimates of their original population are less than 2,000, while the most optimistic do not exceed 4,000. When the French reached Green Bay in 1667, wars and epidemics which had swept Wisconsin after refugee tribes arrived in the 1650s had reduced the Menominee to about 400.

From that point of near-extinction, the Menominee population slowly recovered reaching 850 in 1736, 1,100 in 1764, and 1,350 by 1806. A census in 1854 numbered the Menominee at 1,930 in seven villages. Despite adding a group of landless Potawatomi and French mixed-bloods during the 1870s, the Menominee dropped to 1,422 by 1910. Current enrollment of the federally recognized Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin is close to 7,200 —3,400 of whom live on their reservation just west of Green Bay.

In 1961, the federa government terminated the Menominee’s tribal status, and their reservation became a Wisconsin county. The saw mill could not provide enough tax base to pay for all of the services a county government was required to provide, and the Menominee instantly went from being one of the most self-sufficient tribes in the United States to the lowest standard of living in Wisconsin. To meet their obligations, the Menominee were forced to sell part of their reservation as lakefront lots for vacation homes (Legend Lake). Federal recognition was restored in 1973.

MenomineeCoWI Coordinator: MAKtranscriber WIGenWeb State Coordinator: Tina Vickery WIGenWeb Assistant State Coordinator: Marcia Ann Kuehl