Recollection Wisconsin brings together digital cultural heritage resources from Wisconsin libraries, archives, museums and historical societies and shares them with the world in partnership with the Digital Public Library of America. This presentation will highlight resources for family history research from Recollection Wisconsin and DPLA. It will also showcase one of Recollection Wisconsin's current initiatives, Listening to War: Digitizing Wisconsin’s Wartime Oral Histories, an effort to preserve and provide access to more than 1,100 oral history interviews documenting the lives of Wisconsin veterans and civilians during wartime.

Cathy Markwiese. Cathy has been with the Milwaukee Public Library for 33 years and currently serves as the Management Librarian for Cataloging, Processing and Electronic Subscriptions. 

 

Shawn Vesely.  Shawn graduated from the iSchool at UW-Madison in 2016 with an MA in Library and Information Studies in 2016, with a focus on archives and cataloging. As a Wisconsin wartime veteran himself, this project is very important to him. It is a real privilege to be working to extending the life, reach, and visibility of these materials.  Shawn is currently the Audiovisual Project Archivist for WiLS.

Learn how to find your German origins without needing to know fluent German. We will learn what records are helpful in finding your ancestors hometown, and what to do once you have discovered where to look. We will also discuss online German resources and German-American resources.  

Carolin Kauten’s interest in genealogy started as a child asking her grandma about taking a horse and buggy to school in her rural Iowa community school. Carolin grew up asking questions and collecting family stories. She has centered her career around archives and museums earning an M.A. in museum studies and a MLIS in library and information science. She loves teaching others how they can bring their own family stories to life through research. Carolin has a blog, podcast and is active on social media through her website memorykeeperguide.com 

Many of us have family documents stored in old shoe boxes, suitcases or plastic tubs but don’t know what to do with them. They might be letters from the war front, scrapbooks your grandmother put together, photographs, genealogies, financial documents, or legal records. This workshop will go over what is worth keeping and how best to organize and store them for future generations.

 

Alison E. Bridger currently works as a Cataloger at the Wisconsin Historical Society in the Library, Archives and Museum Collections Division. She teaches “Archival Arrangement and Description“ at UW-Madison.  She has worked at the UCLA -Berkeley Bancroft Library where she handled many family collections, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. where she cataloged manuscripts from before the year 1700, including many legal documents.

Tracy Reinhardt, Thornton Library Director at the Galloway House & Village of the Fond du Lac County Historical Society.

Tracy brings to life the 2018 publication of, Twenty-five Years on the Streets of Milwaukee After Dark; Together With Sketches of Experiences as Newsboy in the Army, Capture and Imprisonment in Libby Prison, and Other War-time Notes.  This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible.

 

Tracy Reinhardt is a native of Fond du Lac Co.  With an Associate degree in Civil Engineering, she is presently Library Director for the Fond du Lac County Historical Society.  Tracy received the "Alice Weber Creativity Award" from the Wisconsin Rural Artists Association State Show (1974), and self-published the Mahoney genealogy (1972), Reinhardt Road genealogy(1982), Keilberg Carousel (1986), Pickled Turkey Eyebrows Mahoney Style genealogy (2006), The Night the Churches Burned (2008), and A Boy From Eden (2014).  She has been the editor of the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society Newsletter for 5 years.