 Welcome to this week's legislative update. I'm Jim Baumgart, along with Nanette Bolabush, who is the co-host of the program. Welcome to this week's program. We're going to deal with the historical part of Sheboygan County today with the Stephen Rogstert, who is the director of development for the Sheboygan County Historical Society, and the new staff person. Welcome to the program. Thank you, I really appreciate the chance to be here. We chatted a few days ago, maybe a week ago, about coming on the program, because this new job that you have is to target some new ideas and some new approaches. And many of the people in Sheboygan County haven't met you, so why don't you introduce yourself a little bit on who you are, and that'll be a good start. Well, I live in Racine, and so I actually commute up to Sheboygan Falls every day. I drove up this morning very early. Weather was good. But I come from a historic passion for history in my background, and I serve as president of the Racine Museum Board and as president for Preservation Racine. And a Lincoln expert. Well, I'll humbly acknowledge a scholar. I don't think anybody's really an expert, but yes, I've spent the great deal of my life studying and speaking and teaching about Lincoln. If somebody's interested, when you're going to be somewhere, they should show up if they want to. Oh, I would love it if they'd show up if I was talking about Lincoln, absolutely. OK, it's good to know. But no, I've known Beth Dippel, our executive director over at the Center for the last seven years, and so we had some conversations about taking the organization in some new initiatives and some new activities. And so I'm happy to be on board. It's a fun job, and it's a great organization. One of the things they have at the society is a huge amount of material that deal with old records and genealogy and a great deal of things that people maybe having in their attics and from their grandparents and other things, should they be aware that maybe these may be things that should be preserved? Because you have, I think, a million items that are in your. 500,000 images and a million documents. That's a lot. You know, those numbers are more than just impressive, because when you think of a million documents and growing and 500,000 photographic images and growing, we are the largest, if not the largest, close to the largest, single private collection of that in the state of Wisconsin, private collection, because the organization does not receive any public money. So the organization is celebrating its 35th year this year, and it has subsisted strictly on the generosity and the support of people and businesses who give to the research center. And you know, Sheboygan's fortunate they have the Sheboygan County Museum, which houses the Historical Society. And then we're the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center. And so we are like the archive and the public outreach arm of the historical agencies. I like to think of it in the greater Sheboygan area. So we want to clarify, you're not the museum. You work with them quite a bit. Oh, yes. But you are the Historical Research Center located in Sheboygan Falls. Correct. And I did not know this. I did not know that you don't receive public funding. I thought you were like part of the county infrastructure. But it's all private money. But you are public in that anyone is welcome to come on in and see what you have. Absolutely. And they do come. I mean, we service between 4,000 and 5,000 visitors that walk through our doors physically every year. But in addition, the outreach programs, the courses, the classes, the seminars, the lectures, reach about another 10,000 people each year. That's wonderful. It's phenomenal numbers when you talk about people coming in to do research. And this would be a good starting point for anybody that's looking to do research on their family, their business, their school, genealogy, the history of Sheboygan Falls, or the history of the greater Sheboygan County area. The archive is immense, just immense. Well, one of the things that you may or may not know yet is that the museum gets a small stipend from the county, I think $10,000 a year. And the rest, they do it by getting pledges and memberships and other things. And I see no reason why, because of the wonderful work that you're doing that the county shouldn't be supportive. There are those, of course, who are just absolutely adamant that no government money should go for preserving anything. But I think as you're growing and the need to protect this stuff should be very important to the citizens and the government of Sheboygan County, they should be helping you out. And I'm on the county board. Yeah, he's on the county board, so we can certainly help. You know, not that we should pay for the whole thing, but we should be part of the program. And I think people out there viewing this should understand that if we want to protect our history, it costs the money and we should all do it together, and not necessarily just leave it up to the few to donate and to volunteer free for somebody else to then use the material and gain the benefits. You are on the county website, I believe. If someone wants to find out more about the Historical Research Center, they can go to the county website and you're right there. They sure can, they sure can. And if they don't go to the county website, they can simply go to www.shrchrc.org and you'll see what we do there. Well, I appreciate your progressive thinking on that because one of the things that the center will be facing in the not too distant future will be what to do about housing its collection. And right now we are in the discussion and contemplation stages of possibly building a new building in a few years down the road. Because you have so much stuff and your building is only so... Well, we're already stuffed. And I can tell you, if anybody wants to question how much stuff we really have, all they would have to do is come over and visit us because we have stuff in rubber-made containers that are stacked up even in hallways. And all of it has to be cleaned, identified, processed. You have to create a database for documents. All the photographic images are scanned in digitally and they have to be identified. It takes a great deal of effort and work to preserve history. And we're fortunate. The center has over 150 volunteers that come in regularly to process and help. It's an astounding thing when you come into the building like I do every day and you see it in action. People around a table and some are processing could be obituaries, some could be doing weddings, some could be doing maps. It is just an impressive site and we have the public coming in daily doing research on their families or their homes or buildings. And some of the material that we have has to be put in a room that is... Well, it has to be climate control. And you have to have the right environment to preserve documents for posterity. So walk me through. I say I haven't been to the center and I haven't been there in too long. But I'm... My family, Bulabash, is we're not from Wisconsin but I married a coon which has a long history in Wisconsin. So I want to find out more information about my in-laws family. I walk in there and is there someone there who's going to help me? Is there someone who can help me find the records about marriage things, death certificates? You will not be left to your own devices, I can assure you. We have people there that will pull files for you as long as they know what you're looking for. They know where those files are and would be more than happy to go and get them for you. Walk you through what you're looking at. Possibly give you some suggestions on other avenues of research. So yeah, you won't be left wondering or contemplating, oh, this is somewhat overwhelming and I don't know how to get started. We love people that maybe have never done research before and they're doing it for the first time. And you come in and you find yourself having a great deal of fun in a very short time because you're starting to uncover the history of whatever it is that you're there for. And then all of a sudden, that history of it is coming alive. And then all of a sudden a light bulb is going on and you might have remembered something your parents have told you, your grandparents told you, your family told you. You think, oh yes, I remember that. And that's the exciting thing about history is recreating the story because that's all history is, it's stories. And it's not necessarily just facts and figures and names. It's the stories that you're trying to bring to life out of this archive of documents and images. Oh, that's wonderful. Well, and they do have classes periodically. I remember the organization and they mail this information and they'll list certain classes on genealogy or whatever it might be. And so people, if they're paying attention, can go in there and I suppose for a couple dollars, whatever the fee or maybe it's even free, but they can learn on how to do genealogy the right way. You have a whole series of programs coming up, right? We have genealogy classes that have been taking place for many, many years. We've had a program called, which we call Second Saturdays, which take place nine times a year over at the Plymouth Arts Center. We bring in a number of different lecturers to talk about a lot of different topics. Hopefully most of them are regional and local. We also have something called History on the Move, which our executive director does and she goes out and talks about various topics pertaining to local and county history. And it's a great, there's a lot of community outreach with this organization. You know, it's not, you don't go to the center like you would go to a museum to maybe interact and touch a three-dimensional object. You're going there to do research. And so you have to make research exciting. And that's different than going to a museum and being able to go through and look at all the fine artifacts, for example, that the Sheboygan County Museum has. But you won't be coming there to do that. You'll be coming there to do research. And when you take a look at the number of people that come in daily, just daily, looking to find answers to questions that they have, it's very, very impressive. And, you know, I think every organization would say they're the best kept secret in their respective town. I think everybody says that because they would love to see more people or they don't hear people talking about them. I will say that I think that Sheboygan County Historical Research Center is one of their best kept gems in Sheboygan Falls. And I would encourage any of the viewers to come in someday. And even if you've never done research but you watched this program, then just say, if nothing else, I want to come over and meet Steve. Because then I'll tell them, come down to the archive with me and I'll show you what we do here. And I would encourage anybody to come over. Wonderful. Well, and we're running out of time. All right. We have to end it. And I wanted to thank Steve and Rock said for who's the new director of development at the Sheboygan County Historical Research Center. That's it for coming in. And if you have any questions, they are in the Falls telephone book and you can just come online. And online. And so don't hesitate to look them up and stop in if you have questions because they'll certainly try to answer them. Thank you very much for sharing this time with us until next time. This has been Legislative Update.