Veterans' records being digitized
When a military veteran dies, their burial place and some basic information about their service is reported to the Butler County government.
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 Veteran’s 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.
A full report will appear in the Butler Eagle.
