| Chapman's Illustrated History of Kent County Michigan was published in 1881 by Chas C. Chapman & Co. of Chicago in 1881. It is over 1400 pages outlining the history of Kent County, and the townships in it up to that time.
The book was compiled with the careful and painstaking diligence of the publisher's historian. A seven-member committee of the Old Residents' Association of the Grand River Valley then edited the manuscript to ensure a full, accurate and impartial account of men and events connected with the political, religious and commercial history of Kent county.
In 1981, nearly one hundred years after the publication of The History of Kent County, Michigan, members of the Western Michigan Genealogical Society undertook the enormous task of indexing every name in the book. The names and page numbers were written on file cards donated by the Grand Rapids Public Library. These cards were then filed in alphabetical order, with the page number of duplicate names entered on one card. This file has since been housed in twenty-two card file drawers at the Grand Rapids Library, located in Grand Rapids, Kent County, Michigan.
Members of the Western Michigan Genealogical Society decided in 1999 that the age of technology was upon us. Our new mission was to computerize this index by typing every card into a computer file. This undertaking was proudly completed and made ready for publication in 2001, one hundred and twenty years after the history was published.
A great appreciation goes out to the committed hours of Western Michigan Genealogical Society's many members who made this index possible.
The names in this database are linked to images of the pages provided by University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service, which has provided searchable scanned images of many different books of Michigan History. |
