Genealogy Research of the Families of

Tomah, Monroe County, Wisconsin

 

   Welcome to a website that contains extensive genealogical research of the families that settled in and around Tomah, a city in Monroe County in west-central Wisconsin.  This website is the result of more than 45 years of research of the ancestors and descendants of more than 400 families who made their home in the Tomah area or are related by marriage to those who did.

   The research began in the 1930’s, when my maternal grandmother, Auguste Lydia (Kewit) Pergande—who was born in 1883 in Ridgeville Township—began to clip and save obituaries and selected articles from Tomah-area newspapers.  After her death in 1975, the collection was continued by her oldest daughter, Bernice (Pergande) Griggs.  Mom passed away in 2000, and I continued to add to the collection—at first from subscriptions to Tomah papers and then from on-line sources like websites of the Sonnenburg Family Funeral Home, the Torkelson Funeral Home, and the Tomah Journal/La Crosse Tribune.  There are nearly one thousand obituaries in the collection, and they formed the basis for the development of the RootsMagic database that was used to develop this website.

   In addition to information from the obituaries, the database contains extensive research from online websites with sources such as immigration records, census records, Find-a-Grave cemetery records, and Social Security death records; genealogy research websites like Ancestry, MyHeritage, Geneanet, and FamilySearch; and contributions from people who have contacted me after finding this website.  As a result, the database now contains nearly 79,000 Monroe County settlers and their descendants or people who have relationship ties to families in the Tomah area.

   Listed below are links to various sections of research that are located on this website:

Tomah Family Trees                       Reports of the descendants and marriage-related relatives of families who settled in the Tomah area of Monroe County in the mid- to late-1800’s.

Tomah Mayflower Families             Reports of the Tomah-area descendants of nine passengers on the Mayflower during its famous voyage from England to Plymouth Rock in 1620.

Oak Grove Cemetery                      Reports of the decedents, burial dates and grave locations of nearly 7,000 interments that took place in the cemetery between its opening in about 1860 and the end of 2002.

St. John’s Parish Register              Reports of all of the people whose birth, baptism, confirmation, marriage, death and/or burial are recorded in the original Parish Register of St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, Ridgeville.  The church has three registers that have been used to record the above information since its founding, and this website includes the Book I register entries that were made between 1861 and 1889.  St. John’s is included in this website because it was the home church of my Pergande and Jaskewicz (Kewit) ancestors on The Ridge.

Griggs and Pergande Families         Reports of the ancestors and descendants of my Griggs and Pergande families.

   I hope that you enjoy the research that is contained in the above reports.  This information is by no means complete, so if you have information that you would like to correct or add to any of the reports, please contact me at the e-mail address below. 

   To view the information, click on the section links below.  Once you are in a particular section, click on its various links to see the listed reports or other websites.  IMPORTANT:  To navigate within a section or to go to another section, click the “Back Arrow” or the “Home” link in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen containing the various pages.  Also, if you see a “Black Camera Icon” next to a name, click on it to see a picture related to that particular person.

 

·        Tomah Family Trees

·        Tomah Mayflower Families

·        Oak Grove Cemetery

·        St. John Parish Register

·        Griggs and Pergande Families

 

Gary Griggs

Murrells Inlet, SC

garygriggs1@outlook.com

 

 

Created with RootsMagic Genealogy Software.   http://www.rootsmagic.com/