When a military veteran dies, their burial place and some basic information about their service is reported to the Butler County government.

This has been the case since 1800 when the county was founded, and it counted many Revolutionary War veterans among its residents.

Those records, kept on index cards for about 200 years, are finally being put into a digital database where county employees can more easily search for information.

Volunteering every afternoon to type in the information from the cards is a familiar face around the county government center, former county commissioner and county treasurer Joan Chew.

“They've been here forever,” she said about the records, which are kept in a filing cabinet in the Veterans Services office.

Chew has been at work for several weeks. She started with Revolutionary War veterans and has worked her way chronologically to Civil War veterans.

Many of the more recent records are already digitized, but the Spanish-American War and World War I-era files still need to be entered.

The department frequently gets requests for family records from people who are doing genealogical research and having a digital database will make it much easier for county employees to access the records, said John Cyprian, director of Veteran Services for the county.

The cards include the veterans' name, the dates of their service, the branch of the military they were in, their rank and unit they were enlisted with, their date of death and the location of their burial.

Some of the cards contain miscellaneous notes, such as family numbers or the date of their obituary.

“People are researching their grandparents all the way back to the Revolutionary War. They usually have more information than we have,” Cyprian said.

There are veterans of nearly every military conflict buried around the county, including five soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Though Chew is a volunteer, not an employee, County Treasurer Diane Marburger got permission this week from County Sheriff Mike Slupe to get her a county identification badge allowing her to bypass the building's metal detector and get into the treasurers's office where she works on entering the records.

“She's been such a productive citizen,” Marburger said.