I have Wisconsin Land Records for two of my ancestors, Mathias FIRMENICH and Jean Baptiste LAURENT. I will use Mathias’ Land Record for this example. You can view his Land Record on my Mathias site’s “Land Purchase” entry.

Step one is to find the spot on the record that lists the exact location that your ancestor purchased from the US Government. On Mathias’ record, in the first paragraph, it reads

..the claim of Mathias B. Firmenich has has been established and duly consummated in conformity to law for the southeast quarter of Section 18 in Township 46 north of Range 4 west of the 4th Principal Meridian in Wisconsin containing 160 acres.

To most people, this just looks like gibberish. It did to me at first. I knew what it meant, but I had no idea where to even start to look for it.

By some luck, I happened to find Wisconsin’s Public Land Survey System website. The site provides “County and regional Public Land Survey System (PLSS) Township indexes for the state of Wisconsin.” Wisconsin’s PLSS is measured from the Fourth Principal Extended Meridian, which is part of the “4th Principal Meridian” mentioned in Mathias’ record.

Once I had found this site, I was able to view the Northwest section of the state, which is where I assumed Mathias purchased his land. I looked at that map and found Township 46 listed on the right side of the map and then Range 4 listed at the bottom of the map and traced it to its location in Ashland County. This information would be used on the next website that I found.

It’s a pleasant surprise that the Wisconsin DOT website has a section that includes very detailed maps of every single county in the state. These maps are multi-megabyte PDF files that contain a lot of information about each county. For example, here is the map for Ashland County (PDF). If you’re looking at the Ashland County map, you will see their marking for Township 46 North (T-46-N) on the sides and also Range 4 West (R-4-W) on the top and bottom. If you follow these, you will end up at the town of White River. It’s tough to see, but the town boundaries are drawn in a reddish, pinkish dashed line.

Now, the next step is to find the Section in the Township. Mathias’ section is Section 18. Not all of the sections are numbered in the town. Each town contains 36-one square mile sections in a 6×6 box. Only the four corners are labeled: 6, 1, 31, and 36 to help you navigate. They number them starting at 1 at the northeast corner, traveling to the west to number 6, then south to number 7, and then to the east and so on, back and forth, until Section 36. There is a small diagram on the right side of the map to help you out. Section 18 is 2 sections south of Section 6 on the map.

Once I found Section 18, the Land Record than says that he purchased land in the southeast quarter. Each section contains 640 acres and each quarter is 160 acres. Mathias then would have purchased the bottom-right corner of Section 18 in 1893.

To convert this into a physical location that can help you better visualize it takes some more work. What I did was keep the county map open while going to Google Maps in another window. What you need to do here is find any roads, highways, or other physical features on the county map and find them on Google Maps. Mathias’ land was bordered to the south by Maple Ridge Rd. Section 18 itself was bordered on the north by Deer Creek Rd, so I just needed to guess about 160 acres to the south of that (or halfway between the roads) for the north side of Mathias’ land. It seems Section 18 also crossed Highway 112 a little bit, which means Mathias’ land did also. It’s doubtful that the full highway was there in 1893.

I then used Google Maps’ My Maps section to draw a box around Mathias’ land to make it easier to see. The final product is this map of the land purchased by Mathias FIRMENICH in 1893.

View Corrigan/Firmenich in a larger map

This also matches up with the 1898 Ashland County Plat Map that lists Mathias’ land.

You may run into some issues if your ancestor purchased land that is now part of a larger city since these county maps do not go into detail inside of cities. I hope this is helpful to someone with Wisconsin ancestors. I know it was neat to see exactly what land my ancestor purchased and lived on in the past. Using Google Maps, you can now share this information and also view it closer using Satellite and even Street View, if applicable.

Helpful Links from the post:

• Wisconsin Public Land Survey System Township Indexes
• Detailed Wisconsin County Maps on the DOT website.
• Google Maps
• Finding Wisconsin Land Records
  • Ancestry.com’s Wisconsin Land Records search – does not include actual record, but does include land detail and location information. Subscription required.
  • Rootsweb’s Wisconsin Land Record search – basic search by name, no land detail or location information. Free.

Click for larger image

This ia photo from my wife’s collection. The photo label says that this is her grandmother’s class at “country school.” We can’t specifically pick her out, but we have some ideas. I like how all the boys are in overalls. they probably need to go back and finish up their farm work when school is over. This school is probably located in the rural areas of southwestern Wisconsin, which is where her grandmother grew up.

The last major ethnic group that has affected my Ancestry (and a bit of Wisconsin) is the Irish. It’s probably the 3rd largest ethnicity in my family tree, behind German and Polish.

All of the Irish in my family tree comes from my paternal grandmother’s line. She herself was born a Corrigan, which is obviously an Irish name. It takes a few jumps back before you find more Irish names since Corrigan seemed like it lasted more generations than the others.

My Irish immigrated over from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland and into Canada (making a stop in New York, I think.) The Michael Corrigan family came along with most of their children. They settled in the town on Mara in Ontario. There is actually a book called, “They Came to Mara,” that has some information on my family. They seemed to have lived there for a few generations before my great-great grandfather, Thomas Corrigan, traveled to and settled in the Ashland/Sanborn area of northern Wisconsin. Ashland is up near Superior; way up in the cold part (The cold-er part to be more specific.)

My Irish family didn’t really expand out of the Ashland area. My great uncle Edwin Corrigan wrote a letter to another family member talking about life in the Ashland area in the early 1900s. I wrote about it in an earlier post and I have transcribed most of it. And, as with most ethnic groups in Milwaukee, the Irish have their own cleverly-named, annual festival: Irish Fest.

The largest group that has affected my ancestry, and also the state as a whole, is the German culture. Every part of my family tree is somehow touched by this ethnicity. My maternal grandfather is almost 100% German and my maternal grandmother (who lives and breathes Irish culture) is closer to German than Irish even though her maiden name is Corrigan.

The are in which I live has examples of German culture everywhere. Cities with names such as Grafton, Hamburg, Germantown, Cedarburg, Fredonia all have German-sounding names and history. Walk into any cemetery in this area and they’ll be overrun with German surnames. Some of the surnames in my family tree with deep German heritage include Last, Thielke, Braatz, Rathke, Luedtke, and Firmenich.

Milwaukee itself was a German melting pot. Germans made up the largest percentage of immigrants in the city itself.

A great number of German immigrants had helped increase the city’s population during the 1840s and continued to migrate to the area during the following decades. Milwaukee has even been called “Deutsches Athen” (German Athens), and into the twentieth century, there were more German speakers and German-language newspapers than there were English speakers and English-language newspapers in the city. (To this day, the Milwaukee phonebook includes more than forty pages of Schmitts or Schmidts, far more than the pages of Smiths.) – Wikipedia

I always consider myself Polish and since I was a child I’ve always sided with the Polish heritage. Though, as it turns out I’m probably much more German than I am anything else. Polish only comes in on my paternal side due to my surname, Zalewski (and who knows if that’s German-Polish.)

While not a big fan of German cuisine, I plan on making it down to Milwaukee’s famous annual Germanfest celebration. As with most of Milwaukee’s ethnic festivals, I assume there will be a large genealogy-related area. Are there any ethnic fesitvals/celebrations in your area?

Photo © fensterbme

Another culture that helped shape Wisconsin into what it is today is the Dutch culture. I may throw in some Belgian stuff, also, since my family crosses into both and the history also crosses into both. My maternal grandmother’s ancestors were mostly Dutch and Belgian (though she’s the “mixed bag” in my tree, bringing in French, French-Canadian, Belgian, Dutch, German, and some others.)

This group seemed to congregate in the east central part of the state, up near Green Bay and Appleton, Wisconsin, which we call the Fox River Valley. You can tell this by the city, place, and family names in that area. Names like Holland and Vandenbroek and a lot of family names that start with “Van.”

Between 1840 and 1890, Wisconsin was a major center of Dutch immigration. Father Theodore Johannes Van den Brock was an early promoter of Dutch Catholic immigration to Wisconsin and beginning in 1848, he helped to bring 40,000 Catholic Dutch to Wisconsin. Most Dutch immigrants to the Fox River Valley followed the Erie Canal-Great Lakes route, landing in Green Bay where many chose to remain. Later Dutch settlements in Wisconsin were generally small agricultural communities. – WisconsinHistory.org

One of my families that came into that area was the Van Parijs family. Somewhere along the line, they changed their name to Van Price (which caused me some trouble, as I posted about earlier.) They settled in the Shawano County area (pronounced like Shaw-no.)

My maternal grandmother’s maiden name is DeBroux (Dah-broo), which is, from my research, from Belgium. They liked to hack the spelling of this surname up in the census. I found it listed by such spellings as DeBrue and Gebroux (but some of these are probably based on the transcriptions.)

The DeBroux family came from Belgium in the late 1800s and settled in Langlade County, which was a popular area for these two cultures. An interesting fact about my DeBroux ancestors that came to Wisconsin is that their names are somewhat unique and I thought that this might help me find information on them. His name is Desire DeBroux and her name was Desiree (unknown surname.) Unfortunately, this is not the case, but it was worth a shot.

Here are some good Dutch/Belgian links for Wisconsin and elsehwhere:

• Trace Your Dutch Roots
• Dutch in Wisconsin
• Zeeland Archives – Great database where I found a lot of info on my families. Only really covers the Zeeland, Netherlands area.

Photo © Jenny Rollo

When trying to think of some things to write about on a constant basis, I browsed some other genealogy blogs out there and got a cool idea. Now, it may be tough to post about my genealogy research and history of the Zalewski name multiple times a week. I thought, why not write some posts about the history and culture of Wisconsin and Milwaukee throughout the years?

I’ve lived and worked in the Milwaukee area my whole life and most of my ancestors either lived in this area or in other parts of Wisconsin. I do a lot of research here and know a lot about the history. Zalewski is somewhat common name in the Milwaukee area due to Milwaukee being a large Polish community, so I’ve done a lot of research there also. Stay tuned for some articles on different parts of the state, it’s culture, and it’s history.

I came across a very interesting letter in my genealogy collection. I’m not really sure how I got it, but I assume it’s from my grandmother. It’s a letter written by my great-great Uncle Edwin Corrigan that he wrote to another relative. In the letter, he describes his life growing up in rural Ashland, Wisconsin and beyond. It’s a great first-person view into life in the country in the early 1900s. Unfortunately, Edwin passed away a few years ago as the longest living descendant of Thomas Corrigan, who came to Wisconsin from Ontario, Canada.

The letter copy I have is written on a typewriter, but a few months ago I transcribed it for my website and also for the Ashland County USGenWeb site as a donation. Here is an excerpt from it where Edwin describes his father’s passing and his older brother’s (my great grandfather) many jobs.

My dad, your great grandfather, died on July 25, 1915 at Ashland. Mother was in the hospital expecting the birth of Sadie – she was brought out to the house to the funeral. Funerals were from the homes in those days. I was 6, but can remember the casket and funeral, although I can’t remember going to the cemetery, which was just kitty-corner from our house – across the line into the city of Ashland.

At that time Maurice was 16 – he did some of the selling of the sand for that summer, then got a job with the Kellogg grocery store, delivering groceries, those were the horse and buggy days – he later got a job working in a saw mill at Odanah, 12 miles east of Ashland, later got a job as a night clerk in the Menard Hotel downtown Ashland. As each of our family members got old enough to work they did so. I recall that when I was 11 I got a job driving horse on a farm when they hauled in the hay – also had to help with the milking and chores. Henry was two years older than I and he got a job when about 14 working at Gingles farm, that is after he finished the eighth grade.

Later on I worked on the same farm for board and room while going to high school – in my senior year I got a job for the Molls where they had 125 colonies of bees, a five-acre orchard and a little garden, I stayed there the next two years while attending the Ashland County Normal to become an elementary teacher. Molls also raised about 300 turkeys each year.

We grew up with very little, but appreciated the fact that Mother was able to keep the family together. I recall that many night when we were about the heater stove, she would shed tears, as she didn’t know what was in store for her and the 9 children.

Very interesting stuff. I have put the complete letter online in my wiki. Read the whole Edwin Corrigan letter.