Editorial: Thank the Bruders, the Rotary, library for our history

Thank Keith and Ginger Bruder, the Belleville Rotary Cozadd Foundation, and the Belleville Area District Library for preserving this area’s history for future generations.
Keith Bruder reports that he and his late wife Ginger were at a small library in a tiny town in Ohio seeking information on a genealogical study they were doing.
They were amazed to find that the small library had its old newspapers on microfiche and they didn’t have to wrestle with large bound volumes as they did at other locations – including Belleville.
The Bruders agreed that Belleville needed microfiche as well. They presented the project to the library and the Belleville Rotary Club and the project was funded by the Cozadd Foundation.
It took a lot of work and lots of money to take apart all those bound volumes to put the contents on film, but the work continued until it was done. The library took over the ongoing project since then. The newspapers in Belleville included the Belleville Enterprise which was the town’s original paper and had published for more than 130 years before it went only online.
The beauty of microfiche is that it is simple and accessible no matter how complicated new computers get. Also, if the films are destroyed here in Belleville, there are still copies at the Clarke Historical Library at Michigan State University, where the microfiches are created, week by week. Thank you all.