RoadsideThoughts
A Gazetteer for the United States and Canada
Home >> State of Florida >> Palm Beach County >> Shawano >> Genealogy HelperIndex...

Our Genealogy Helper

Introduction ...

So far, we found very little information about Shawano. The little that we've found leads us believe that the community is historic.<1>

We've added Shawano to our Gazetteer with the hope that we can develop more information. If you can help us with Shawano, please Contact Us.

We have a couple of goals for our Gazetteer:

  • That it be a tool which helps us with planning our trips.
  • We're trying to shape our Gazetteer as a tool to help us understand the community in which our ancestors lived, the community that was part of their daily lives.
  • On our trips, we try to visit those places where our ancestors left their footprints.

By learning about Shawano (and the surrounding area) during the time that our ancestors lived, we hope to have a better understanding of both their community and its relationship to their lifes. We hope that this tool helps to give us an insight into their world.

As we add data and organize our Gazetteer to help with our family research, we will be adding to this our Genealogical Helper for Shawano. While we don't have information that is specific to any given person or family, we intend to expand our understanding about where and how people lived.

Name Variations for Shawano ...

When searching records, keep in mind that names and their spelling can change over time. Our sources include documents like maps, railroad schedules, Travel, Express and Shipping Guides. Many of these documents date from the 1800's and it's common to find spelling differences.

Although we can't give a definitive list, hopefully the following will give you a feel for the variations that might have occurred.

Shawano has also been known as: Browns Farm and Shawano Village.

If you have information about these names (such as the reason for the change, date of change, the origin of the name), please Contact Us.

Neighboring Counties ...

When searching for family records, we have frequently made the mistake of not checking the neighboring counties.

For example, we have great-grandparents who lived in the northwest corner of their home county. During their lives, most doctors and hospitals were in the next county to the west. Almost all of the nearby churches and cemeteries were in the county to the north.

So when searching for records, we had our best success by looking in neighboring counties instead of the county in which they lived:  their home county contained property and probate records; the county to the west contained birth and death records; the county to the north contained their burial records. If we hadn't included the neighboring counties, we would have missed many valuable sources of information.

If you're in a similar situation, we hope that the following information helps.

Although our information shows that the community of Shawano is historic, it would have been located within present day Palm Beach County.

To see how the shape of Florida's counties have changed over time, we recommend the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries.

The following counties adjoin and form the boundaries of Palm Beach County: Broward, Glades, Hendry, Martin & Okeechobee.

Below are the counties that are near Shawano. For each of these counties, we show a sample of those communities that are closest to Shawano:

For an expanded list of the communities that are closest to Shawano, see our County-by-County Page for Shawano.

Cemeteries Near Shawano ...

Below are cemeteries that are in the vicinity of Shawano.

This is a new section and is likely to have errors. If you find an error, such as a missing cemetery or we have the wrong name, please let us know. If you know of them, we would also appreciate learning about previous or alternate names.

Although we don't have the information ourselves, if you need information about a burial or interment, photos, transcripts, how to contact the cemetery or local authorities, please visit our list of websites on our Genealogy Helper Page for Shawano - one of the links might be able to help.

If not found below, our Cemetery List for Shawano covers a larger area, with the cemeteries listed in alphabetical order.

The following cemeteries are listed based on their distance from Shawano, with the one closest to Shawano listed first.

  • Foreverglades Mausoleum Gardens
    (13 miles [20.9 km] to the northwest)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Foreverglades Mausoleum Gardens
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Foreverglades Mausoleum Gardens have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • South Florida National Cemetery
    (18 miles [29 km] to the east)
  • Our Lady of Peace Cemetery
    (20 miles [32.2 km] to the northeast)
  • Lake Worth Memory Gardens
    (25 miles [40.2 km] to the east)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Lake Worth Memory Gardens
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Lake Worth Memory Gardens have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • Gardens of Boca Raton Memorial Park
    (26 miles [41.8 km] to the southeast)
  • Eternal Light Memorial Gardens
    (27 miles [43.5 km] to the southeast)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Eternal Light Memorial Gardens
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Eternal Light Memorial Gardens have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • Pine Ridge Cemetery
    (27 miles [43.5 km] to the east)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Pine Ridge Cemetery
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Pine Ridge Cemetery have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • Palm Beach Memorial Park
    (27 miles [43.5 km] to the east)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Palm Beach Memorial Park
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Palm Beach Memorial Park have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • Lincoln Memorial Gardens
    (27 miles [43.5 km] to the east)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Lincoln Memorial Gardens
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Lincoln Memorial Gardens have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • Hillcrest Memorial Park
    (28 miles [45.1 km] to the east)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Hillcrest Memorial Park
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Hillcrest Memorial Park have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • Ridgelawn Cemetery
    (28 miles [45.1 km] to the northwest)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Ridgelawn Cemetery
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Ridgelawn Cemetery have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • Boca Raton Cemetery
    (29 miles [46.7 km] to the southeast)
    • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Boca Raton Cemetery
    • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Boca Raton Cemetery have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.
  • Continue List   (5 more) ...
    • Woodlawn Cemetery
      (29 miles [46.7 km] to the east)
      • Jump to our Gazetteer entry for the Woodlawn Cemetery
      • Note: The GPS coordinates that we are using for the Woodlawn Cemetery have been provided by the GNIS.<4> The coordinates still need to be verified.

We've also created an expanded list of communities that existed in the 1890's and were located in the area around Shawano. See our List of 1890's Communities around Shawano.

Newspapers Published in Shawano ...

An ongoing effort between the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has resulted in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

To share their results, the partnership has created the Chronicling America website. The goal of this partnership is to assemble a database about the current and historic newspapers of the United States. This includes a growing collection of scanned images from selected papers. All of it available to the public on their website.

Using information that we've taken from the Chronicling America website, we've identified 42 newspapers that have been published in the area around Shawano.

Although we're unaware of any newspapers that were published in the immediate area of Shawano, there are papers which were published within 30 miles [48.3 km]<6>. A list of those papers, sorted by paper name, can be found on the Extended Newspaper List for Shawano.

Websites to Help With Your Genealogy Research ...

When we do our genealogical research, we first turn to the websites from Cyndi's List, FamilySearch and Genealogy Trails. These websites offer the information directly or else point to where you can find it. Their information is open to everyone.

To help you get started, the following links will take you to the pages that are relevant to Shawano:

Footnotes ...

<1>We use the term 'Historic' broadly and it generally means that the community no longer exists. However, it can also mean that the community might still exist, but was significantly larger or had a more 'official' existence in the past than it does now. Unfortunately our sources of data have proven to be unreliable. If you can provide us with more specific information about Shawano, please let us know so that we can improve our accuracy.
<2>While we're fans and frequent users of TripAdvisor, you should know that we're also members of the TripAdvisor affiliate program.
<3>An 'estimated' location is one where we have been given GPS coordinates, but are unable to verify the accuracy of those coordinates. That said, we have some confidence that we have placed the marker near the actual location. A typical reason for being unable to verify a location is that it might be on private property or maybe historic and gone without an obvious trace.
<4>The location has been supplied by the Geographic Names Information System - which is maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). While these values should be definitive, we found that accuracy can vary and you should double-check the location if accuracy is required.
<5>The Find-a-Grave website is an excellent research tool with information about a cemetery's location and interments. They also offer a forum for their members which can provide additional help. More information about Find-a-Grave can be found on their website: findagrave.com.
<6>Our distances are not driving distances, but are calculated as a 'straight-line' distance. A straight line distance ignores things like rivers, canyons, lakes, et cetera - it's truly a line from Point A (ie- Shawano) to Point B.Our distance measurements begin at a specific point in Shawano. The point we use is located at these GPS coordinates - Latitude: 26.5536, Longitude: -80.5098       In this case, the coordinates for Shawano have been provided by the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).