MARQUETTE - Local veterans will be honored during this Veteran's Day, but the Marquette Regional History Center has found a way to honor them for many days to come.
A new interactive kiosk is now up and running, and it features journals, photographs and oral histories of U.P. veterans dating all the way back to the Civil War.
"We have some wonderful Civil War reminiscences and we continue to collect as we go along," said Kaye Hiebel, executive director for the center. "It really is a wonderful look at how people's lives were changed by those kinds of events."
The project, which was funded by the Michigan Council for the Humanities, looks to showcase the effect war has had on U.P. veterans and their families in the war and at home.
"We didn't want to tell the story of military engagements," Hiebel said. "Rather, the personal aspect, how these extraordinary circumstances affected people's lives on the home front and in the war."
The kiosk has a touch screen, making it easy to interact with and even allowing users to enter their own family name to see what the archives may have and experience war from the point of view of a relative who was there.
"(The kiosk) has state of the art technology, and it allows people to go as deep into these things as they want to," Hiebel said. "You could spend a day right there at that interactive station."
Though the kiosk will give its users instant access to hundreds of stories, the history center also has additional archives for documents that aren't in the kiosk's database.
As a repository for the Veteran's History Project, a national program created in 2000 to help keep the voices of veterans alive, the center is home to a wealth of first-hand accounts of veterans and their experiences.
The kiosk will be a permanent installation in the history center, and Hiebel said she hopes to continue adding to its collection of accounts.
"We would love if people have stories and they would allow us to copy their personal memorabilia for our archive," she said. "It's a living thing, it continues to grow, and that's the wonderful thing about it. We learn wonderful new stories and meet new people."
The Marquette Regional History Center is located at 145 W. Spring St., Marquette. It is open daily at 10 a.m., except for Sunday, when it is closed for the day.
Jackie Stark can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 242.
