Centuries of Bay History Move From Binders to Internet

You may not have heard of Mimi Bird, but if you grew up in the North Shore, chances are she could have told you enough about the history of your family, house and community to send chills up your spine.

So dedicated to local history, she was, that she once took a spade to the Town of Milwaukee Union Cemetery by Bayshore to dig up old tombstones.

In 2002, after 20 years of extensive research on Whitefish Bay and other North Shore communities, Bird died from emphysema at age 69. On Saturday, the unveiled a new online collection containing scanned and searchable files from all 39 of her volumes.

The process of moving binders of handwritten notes and newspaper clippings to an online archive was a long and tedious one, a tribute to the care and attention Bird had poured into them.

“I like to think Mimi’s here,” John Bird, Mimi’s husband, said at the unveiling. “She’s not, but if she were, she’d be incredibly delighted…But I think moreso she’d be gratified by the combined effort of so many people to achieve what she, I’m going to say ‘worked on,’ for so many years. I’m sure she would say she didn’t ‘work’ on this. This was her passion.”

A $5,000 donation from the Bird family paid for the three-month-long scanning process, which was outsourced to Northern Micrographics in LaCrosse. Then volunteers and librarians spent several months preparing the files for their online home, indexing them and tagging metadata to make it easily searchable.

“It became evident our charge was to preserve the history of our community as best we could,” Tom Fehring, a member of the Whitefish Bay Historical Society who helped create the online collection, said. “I think I’ve gotten to know Mimi pretty well even though I never met her in person.”

The collection includes records of houses, businesses, churches and parks; minutes from government meetings; old photographs and newspaper clippings; and oral histories and portraits of residents. The sometimes mundane details are enhanced by the charm of handwritten notes in the margins, reminding the reader that every particular meant something to someone.

H. Russell Zimmermann, an architectural historian who has relied on Bird’s work in his own research, said the collection includes a rare level of detail for communities the size of Whitefish Bay.

“When I started talking to Mimi Bird, I realized I had come across one of these rare types of people that belongs to this exclusive club of amateurs who devote great blocks of time and energy – and mainly passion – to do a project which in the end has as much information and quality as that produced by someone who is specially trained,” Zimmerman said.

Although Whitefish Bay, Bird’s home since she was 4 years old, is the focus of the volumes, Bird also included chapters of information on other areas of the North Shore and Milwaukee, searchable by location online.

“Mimi Bird’s work, and the effort that has gone into preserving her collection, enables our library to better preserve and share this work with those who thrive to connect with their past,” Lisa McGovern, President of the Whitefish Bay Library Board, said.

Volunteers with the Whitefish Bay Historical Society and the Friends of Whitefish Bay Library helped with the process.

You can browse and search the collection here, and read tips on advanced searching here.