The Gangolf Bauer family of
Gross Point, circa 1903.
If you are looking for family in Wilmette, you may also want to check the Wilmette records that have been microfilmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah. These records are available on microfilm through any Family History Center.
If you have family roots in the Wilmette or Gross Point area, the Museum's research library may be able to help you locate information about your ancestors. The library's resources include:
A good place to begin is with our online vital records indexes compiled from birth, marriage, and death certificates, and other records in the Museum collections.The page linked above, also provides information about online indexes to Wilmette Life obituaries, death notices, and news.
These files include family information, news clippings, some letters, and records and reports that other genealogical researchers have donated. If you have records of your Wilmette or Gross Point family, please consider depositing them with the Museum for future generations to enjoy and learn from.
If one or more members of your family operated a business in the area, we may have clippings or other records of that business.
The "People" volumes of our indices to photographs, organized by last name, are worth checking to see if we have a photograph of any members of your family. We also have a card index by last name of all identified people appearing in photographs in our collection.
This collection is always growing. Currently, we have 128 interviews with Wilmette people. More than half of the tapes have been transcribed.
Our collection of street and telephone directories can be a handy tool for finding out about family members. The 1890 directory is especially useful as it can serve as a substitute for the 1890 census (most of which was destroyed in a fire). Directory entries for 1890, 1898, and 1908 have been entered into a database and are available for online searching.
The Wilmette Newspaper Index, available on the Wilmette Public Library website, includes full-text obituaries and death notices from 1923-1928, and obituary abstracts from 1977 to the present. The database also includes general Wilmette news from 1991 to the present.