I am starting an Illinois Norwegian Tri-County/Tri Township Genealogy Guild here in Illinois. Membership is open to anyone no matter where you are located. We will gladly accept membership from anyone, especially those who have ties here in this part of Illinois.

My hopes are to help those who are tracing down ancestor of Norwegian descent from this part of Illinois by developing cemetery records with obituaries for each person buried here. To provide a place for members to post their Family Trees so that they may find relatives through this group or help in obtaining information for there trees.

I have set up a mailing list through egroup so all members may receive any mailings made to the group from anyone that mails from our WEB site or from other members.

The reasoning for starting this group is due to the locations of these townships on the edges of the counties and that the Norwegians migrated some between these 3 counties it made it difficult in tracking down the information. It required one to go to Yorkville, Ottawa and Morris to get information. The genealogy groups and web pages in these areas are very helpful but are lacking in Norwegian information that is readily available. So this group will fill in a need for this area in the three Counties. I hope to have a link to our site from each of these Web sites. Presently we are listed on the Grundy page and once I can post a cemetery from each county I will ask to have a link on the other two pages.

I do have things for people to help with, especially those from the area, but I also have plenty of stuff that you can help with no matter where you are located.

I hope the members will post their family tree to our site or provide a link to their home page so others may have a look at the family.

I also plan on having some history of these old Norwegian churches and towns of this area. But all this takes time and help from others.

Once we have a number of members we will hold elections for officers of the Guild (I do not plan on seeking any position other then to maintain the Web site for a while till I have the information I have posted to the site. At that time I will gladly pass on this duty to any one that would like to do this work. But everyone is welcome to make suggestions on how to make our Guild and our Web site better.

So if you are interested you can fill in your e-mail address and click join (this may take a day or two) or click archive link below the e-mail box and it will take you to the site and you can join there. It will require you to get a password at e-group and to join our particular egroup. It is pretty self-explained once you select this link below.

Once you have joined please read the first message of the group. It will explain on how you may select not to have the e-mail sent directly to your e-mail address but you may still read all the mail from our egroup site. Also this message explains some of the things I would like to do and the help I need.