Menominee County, Wisconsin Genealogy Project - Wisconsin US GenWeb
THE
MENOMINEE COUNTY GENWEB PAGE HAS MOVED...
the NEW SITE will be the only one with the current updates! Please
change your bookmarks to our NEW ADDRESS at:
http://wigenweb.org/menominee/ and we'll see you up at the new
page!
"It takes a thousand voices
to tell a single story."
Welcome to
the Menominee County, Wisconsin Genealogy & Family History
website -- part of the WIGenWeb Project. My name is Anne
and I also host the Shawano GenWeb 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.
And I do mean SHARE YOUR RESEARCH -- we have plenty of
space for:
FAMILY HISTORIES
PHOTOGRAPHS
BIOGRAPHIES
OBITUARIES
MILITARY RECORDS
BIRTH, MARRIAGE & DEATH RECORDS
NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS
POST
CARDS
FAMILY GROUP RECORDS
MAPS
& GAZETTEERS
CENSUS RECORDS
CEMETERY RECORDS
SCHOOL RECORDS
and
ASK ME - I'll make a page!
LOCAL TOWN HISTORIES
Since
this webpage is NEW, the data is limited but with a
little time, I'm hoping to make this as successful as
the Shawano GenWeb site which gets approx. 1000 visits a
week. But I am going to need your help -- anything
that you have that is related to Menominee County would
be greatly appreciated and we always credit the
contributor. And you can send it via email, snail
mail, and we have a 24/7 fax line as well.
People always ask a
little about me & my projects... so here it is in a
nutshell. I grew up in Shawano County & we raised
our children in Gresham. I've done genealogy
research for the past 34 years as a hobby &
professionally did research for the past 15 years, along
with teaching genealogy classes & seminars. My
mother is from German heritage and my father's family is
part Native American & part Canadienne French.
One of his maternal great-grandmothers was Nah-Kah-Kah-Nah-Piew from the
Marinette - Menominee area and another
great-grandmother was Josephine Elizabeth Teller,
daughter of John Teller & Wy-a-we-wee.
One of my greatest
passions in life is FAMILY HISTORY or GENEALOGY.
It is my goal to keep genealogy FREE - meaning I do not
charge for my time & I donate my talents & resources to help people
find their family roots. This is what I strongly
believe in and this is what my genealogy web pages stand
for -- FREE GENEALOGY FOR EVERYONE. If you find
someone financially profiting from any of my free web pages,
please
email me the details. If you have a genealogy
& research questions,
please feel free to ask & if I don't have the answer,
I'll find out who does. And
if you want to volunteer for projects, you are an answer
to a prayer &
email me! (big grin)
We all have mentors in
our lives and one of the kindest people I have had the
pleasure to work with was Jim "Swift Otter" Nesbitt --
he shared with me his expertise & love of Native
American research (as well as Scottish!) and he left us
way too soon. God speed, Jim, and rest assured
that your work with Native American people will
continue.
***
NOTE *** Within these Menominee County GenWeb pages, you
will find materials gathered from many sources. We
try to be as accurate as possible but if a mistake is in
the original source, we transcribe it as we see it.
Also, it is not our intent to hurt or offend anyone --
today, we use the term Native Americans. In prior
years, the records would have referred to Native
Americans also as Indians.
Now to the "good
stuff" - not all of these are up and running...yet!
Have
questions or comments? Please send them in!
Just click on the Dream Catcher... We love to hear
from you!
Looking
for neighbouring towns? Phlox records can be
found at
LANGLADE GenWeb & our parent project is
SHAWANO
GenWeb which has information on the older
Menominee records prior to 1961.
Thanks for stopping by and we
welcome your input & contributions. If you
have favorite sites that you would like to share,
just send us the links!
Again,
it takes a thousand voices to tell a single story.
We'd appreciate hearing
your voice & your story.
Very
brief history...
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 federal
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.
And be sure to try out our
SEARCH
ENGINE. It will search the entire Menominee WIGenWeb site,
BUT
NOT the message boards for
queries and obituaries board. A drawback is that if the surname is
spelled differently than what you type in, you won't find it. So
be sure to check various spellings and even check by town/place names.
When we "transcribe" records, they are entered as they are in the original
document, mistakes and all.
And, I'd like to acknowledge
Tina
Vickery, the WI State Co-ordinator;
Marcia
"MAK" Kuehl, the WI Assistant State Co-ordinator; and
Kelly
Mullins, our WI Project Web Mistress -- the folks that help keep the
WIGenWeb sites up and running! We're proud to be part of the
WisconsinGenWeb Project which is part of the USGenWeb Project.
Quiltalic 11 Bold
Thank you for stopping by!
As you journey
through the Menominee website,
you can always return home to this page by clicking on
the canoe.
And be sure to try out our
SEARCH
ENGINE. It will search the entire Menominee WIGenWeb site,
BUT
NOT the message boards for
queries and obituaries board. A drawback is that if the surname is
spelled differently than what you type in, you won't find it. So
be sure to check various spellings and even check by town/place names.
When we "transcribe" records, they are entered as they are in the original
document, mistakes and all. 
