Is Van Buren County Michigan's best-kept genealogical secret?

Last month I finally made it to Decatur, Michigan, home of the Van Buren District Library Local History Collection in the Webster Memorial Library and the Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society of Southwest Michigan.

Don't wait as long as I did. If you have research targets in Allegan, Berrien, Cass, Kalamazoo, or Van Buren counties, this is a must-see collection. Highlights of the collection include

• vital records, 
• newspapers from the 1850s, 
• plat books as early as 1860, 
• yearbooks, 
• Sanborn fire insurance maps on microfilm, 
• an obituary collection, 
• the Bess Britton Michigan One-Room Schoolhouse Collection, and 
• the Southwest Michigan Military Registry Project. 

If you need microfilm from Salt Lake City, you can order it sent to Decatur for viewing.

The department's rooms are packed full, and I hear there are prospects of expansion.

For more details, check out my previous posts mentioning the county or society or library.



Harold Henderson, "Is Van Buren County Michigan's best-kept genealogical secret?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society, Michigan

I just caught the note in the Paw Paw Courier-Leader (can't make these names up) that the Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society's annual pot luck meeting and white elephant auction is Monday night the 23rd at the society's mecca, the Webster Memorial Library in Decatur. Besides its namesake county, VBRGS covers the far-southwest Michigan counties of Allegan, Berrien, Cass, and Kalamazoo.

The society has a nice collection of online resources at the Van Buren County GenWeb site, including obituary and cemetery indexes. Its physical resources are in the Webster Library's Local History Room, and they include deed and other fundamental record indexes for several counties. (Check out their online catalog by title.) The Local History Room is itself worthy of note. It also acts as a borrowing agency for Family History Library films. This is a quality of holdings and services I don't see offered at many public libraries of this size. (Decatur's population is under 2,000.) Time to pay them a visit.