Wisconsin became a state in 1848, but it took a long time for Wisconsin to get good record keeping practices. Prior to 1907 civil registration was not required by the State of Wisconsin that vital events be registered with them. That Wisconsin has any registered marriages, death or births prior to 1907 at all is because persons who had knowledge of those events could voluntarily conduct a registration, I think always at the courthouse and almost always by the officiant of the wedding, etc. It seems that making a special trip to the court house just to register a marriage, birth or death was burdensome. So an officiant would wait until he had an unrelated reason to go to town, and stop off at the courthouse to do all of his registering then. A result of this practice is that marriages, births and deaths in the Peninsula Belgian community were commonly not registered in the county where the event occurred, but rather in a country where the priest happened to visit sometime thereafter. Brown County was the most common recipient of these out-of-the-county marriage registrations. No surprise there. But some are rather strange. For example; such as being married or dying in the Town of Brussels, but the marriage was registered in Kewaunee County.
In Wisconsin there is also an old law that prohibits reproduction and sharing of vital records. So if you want copies of the originals you have to pay. Historically the groups of volunteers have created some county level indexing, such as this list courtesy of the Peninsula Genealogical Society: http://sites.rootsweb.com/~wipgs/PGS/DCDeathIndexAlphaToEndof1897on20May2008.pdf
Those early volunteer efforts have largely turned into a larger pre-1907 index effort that can be found in three main locations (Wisconsinhistory.org, familysearch.org and Ancestry). However it is possible that some records only exist at the county level and are not in the state-level collection.
If the record made it to the state one can see some basic info and order a copy from the Wisconsin historical society, an example:
An example is Leopold Debeck(er)'s wife, Julienne Kinnart. The state had no copy of her death record, but the county did. And to make matters worse it recorded her birthplace wrong (France instead of Belgium). Same goes for her marriage record, only at the county level and a most unusual one, filed 40 some years after the event. The civil record says they were married at Bay Settlement, but no church record survives.
In a few other cases I have found some of the records the Rev. René Vilatte made ended up in Canada where he went after starting a bunch of churches here.
Another problem I have found is sometime ago the Green Bay dioceses attempted to consolidate their church records, while it's convenient having to only go to one place vs a lot of different churches, they did a poor job. I have seen the paper records for infant deaths of my Bertrand relatives 20 years ago, and now they cannot be found on microfilm. Many are really badly out of focus too.
In many cases before the establishment of today's surviving churches and resident priests (mostly the establishment of the Norbertine order) the only records I have found are property tax records. An example is Jean Joseph Moen's (my 3rd great grandfather); his death location of Dyckesville is from Serge A Theriault, who has possession of Rev. Rene Vilatte church record book, however it had no date. J.J. Moens is shown having last paid his property tax Feb 23, 1892 and there are no further records of him or his property after that date. While Jean Joseph lived in Champion, his oldest son lived in Dyckesville so I assume when he got older he lived with his son and that is where he died.
It's a pretty discouraging mess. To be a purist you have to check a lot of places, especially when you consider the Belgian’s were spread across three different counties.
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