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Genealogical Society of Monroe County, MI

Our Current Projects

GSMC members have always been very active in transcribing the county's vital records for our many publications.  We can use assistance transcribing at the courthouse (Wednesdays 9-12 and 1-4), proofreading records, or creating indexes.  Or just come in to help us make copies!  
 
We have several other projects being worked on if you can't go to our archives or the courthouse.  If you are interested in helping out with any of these projects, please let us know.  
 
  1. Master Cemetery Index- the indexes for the cemetery transcriptions done by Frieda Kellie and Shirley Keehn in the late 1970's and early 1980's are almost completed now... we have over 43,300 listings and need help with proofreading.  If you would like to help proofread the indexes for a cemetery or two, we could use the help so we can get the index completed and uploaded to our website.  Stop in on a Wednesday to get some copies to check. 
  2. King's Notes Update- in 1979 the Museum published the notes of Jason King who had amassed a huge collection of information about the Civil War soldiers who lived in Monroe County.  Jason died before he could finish his project, so the museum published his NOTES, hence the name of the book.  King's Notes is missing information and much more information is available to researchers (especially on the internet) so we are updating the book in conjuction with the Friends of the Museum as a fund raiser for the Monroe County Historical Museum.  There are over 2900 listings in the database and so far we've confirmed over 2400 of these men were Monroe County residents and have folders on most of them in the Monroe County Historical Museum.   List of soldiers with folders.  NOTE:  This list is 309 pages, legal size.  Be careful when printing!!  If you have a relative that is listed in King's Notes, PLEASE let us know what additional information you have on him.  We are trying to find the following on each soldier:
  • Complete death date (King just gave year of death, if known)
  • Place of death
  • Burial location
  • Whether grave has a tombstone on it
  • Birthdate
               If you have information on any Monroe County Civil War soldiers, we would appreciate hearing from you!  Please note in some cases there was more than one man with the same name that served in the war.  We still need to create folders for about 450 soldiers and could use help finding the above information about each of these men.  Soldiers without folders.   We have 2 file cabinets in the museum with over 2065 file folders already.  Be sure to stop by the museum to see the collection we have amassed on the men from Monroe County that served our country during the Civil War.  Several of our county soldiers do not have markers on their graves.  See attached list for those without markers.   ........mmnbb..lll.           
  1. Cemetery Transcriptions-  it has been quite some time since the county's cemeteries have been transcribed, if you are interested in tackling a cemetery, please let us know!  Some have already been done (Oakgrove and Pleasantview, thanks to Barb Roe!) and others are in progress (London, Memorial Place, and St. Paul in Maybee).  If you are willing to spend a few hours walking a cemetery in the county, let us know!  We'd love to add to our list of transcriptions.  
  2. Obit Index Additions- over 2200 entries in the museum obit file do not have first names.  Most of these are married women listed as Mrs. (first name of husband).  We've begun checking these in the county death records, census, and marriage records to fill in the unknown first name for these women.  Take a look at the attached list and if you know what the first name should be send a note to Chris Kull along with your source of the information.