Milwaukee Central Public Library Downtown, 814 West Wisconsin Avenue
- MCGS membership meetings are in person at the Central Library. The meetings will start with a short business meeting, followed by our speaker presentation about 1:15pm. Look forward to seeing MCGS members and guests at the library!
“Fred Beckmann: from the Clark House to the Wisconsin House”
by Reed Perkins
In this illustrated talk, historian and genealogist Reed Perkins will show how he combines genealogy with a wide variety of other historical sources to make informative, illustrated stories that serve as a great way to organize and share one’s ideas, and guide further research and discovery.
Reed Perkins has a life-long love of history and a passion for separating fact from legend. In 2006, he began focusing his research on a some of his Wisconsin ancestors and their stories. In 2012, he began an ongoing collaboration with the newly-formed Jonathan Clark House Museum in Mequon, Wisconsin, and shortly afterwards became the museum’s official historian, As Historian, Reed investigates and shares the family histories and activities of the Clarks, their relatives, neighbors and friends, and the day-to-day details of the world in which they lived. Since 2016, he has chronicled those stories in over 450 illustrated and annotated posts to his blog, Clark House Historian. Along the way, Reed has become unexpectedly well-informed on a number of more specialized topics including the first Erie Canal, early Great Lakes steamboat travel, the settlement of Lower Canada’s Eastern Townships, the California Gold Rush, army life at Forts Howard and Winnebago, and early federal and local road construction in Wisconsin Territory.
Reed holds a Bachelor of Music from Miami University (Ohio), and a Master of Music from Northwestern University, and has extensive post-graduate training as an orchestral conductor in the U.S. and overseas. He has worked with orchestras, ensembles, and theater companies in a half-dozen states as well as in Italy and Czechia. Reed has taught music history, music theory, and conducting at the College of William & Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of Massachusetts- Amherst. His attention to detail and knowledge of 18th- and 19th-century American and European concert and vernacular musics—and their accompanying political and cultural contexts—also informs his study of the lives of American immigrants, settlers, and the early history of Wisconsin territory and state.
Reed was born and raised in the Land of Lincoln, and has had the good fortune to live and work there, and in other history-rich places such as Williamsburg,Virginia, and Amherst, Massachusetts. He now lives in Kenosha, Wisconsin, with his wife, Dr. Laura Rexroth.
His blog postings incorporate primary and secondary sources, public-domain visual images, and links to other CHH blog posts and additional—sometimes obscure—sources, all to tell a more complete and interesting story of the life and times of our early Wisconsin pioneers.
Join us: IN PERSON or ZOOM for meeting.
Please register for a zoom link to the meeting.
