Time, talent, and treasure

The archive is missing things that no book contains.

Photographs. Almost every piece here is about a building that is gone, and the ones still standing have never been photographed for this. A picture of a barn, a storefront, a road, a gravestone.

Family papers. Letters, deeds, ledgers, a great-grandmother's diary. The 1882 county history was written from what three thousand people told a man who came to the door, and it is full of things only they knew.

Stories. If somebody in your family was here before the war, or ran a shop on the square, or taught in a one room school, that is a record and nobody has written it down.

There are forms for all of it and they go straight to the publisher.

Corrections are the most useful thing anybody can send.

This archive has been wrong. A printing office was counted twice. A town was mapped to the wrong township. A quotation was attributed to a book that did not contain it. Every one of those was caught by going back to the source, and a reader who knows the county will catch things a source cannot.

If a date is wrong, a name is misspelled, or a piece says something your family knows to be untrue, send it. Corrections are published and dated, with the piece they belong to.

Local knowledge counts as talent. Somebody who can say which building that was, or whose farm that road ran through, is doing archival work.

If none of the above fits, or if it does and you want to do this as well, the site takes money.

There is no subscription and there is no wall. This runs on whatever it runs on, and what it costs is hosting, copies from the county recorder, film and developing, and the occasional book that is not free.

The money goes to Indian Lakes Marketing, which is the company that publishes the Gazette and which is also a marketing firm in Wolcottville. That is stated on the About page too and it is stated here because a reader should know who they are paying before they pay.

Give once, in any amount you like, or ten dollars a month. Money does not change what a piece says or whether it runs.