A Stark County resident is tracing his German-Hungarian family’s roots through a project called Preservation on the Prairie. The project, which was sponsored by the Stark County Historical Society via grant from Humanities North Dakota, is headed by Anna Andrzejewski, a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She, along with graduate students Travis Olson, Laura Grotjan and Carly Griffith, are working to preserve the history of Stark County’s German-Russian and German-Hungarian families.
“We get out a tape measure and we create floor plans of the buildings as well as sometimes drawings of the exterior of the buildings,” said Andrzejewski. “We’re using the buildings kind of to learn about the people, but we can’t do it just with measured drawings like this. We have to learn from maps, other kinds of records, atlases — talking to people is the best resource that we’ve found. You guys know when your properties were homesteaded. You have information that has been passed down to you about the history of these buildings, and that helps us fill the gaps.”