To find out, you'll have to pull yourself away from your computer and go to Monroe, WI's National Historic Cheesemaking Center. Yes, they have a website and it has a link to cheesemaker oral history interviews (on their YouTube site) plus a "History of Cheese" recap. The interviews might be useful for Swiss/Wisconsin family lore that would give you some ideas, but the earliest interviews I saw dated to 2018. What the actual venue in Monroe - just outside the town square - offers is the chance to physically locate your family's farm and see who & what they lived near, whether they were in the town or off in the wilderness, what natural resources and avenues of transportation they had (navigable waterways, roads), etc. All of these matter, particularly when there is more than one person in the town with your ancestor's name and you need to figure out which one married your other ancestor and ultimately produced YOU. Especially if you have to do a written analysis, you will need to be able to show how the couple could ever have possibly met and the map is your ally in that case. In the photo below, taken at the National Historic Cheesemaking Center (© Maura Mackowski 2019), you will see a notebook, wall map, and photo display. Look up your ancestor in the notebook, see a photo of their farm on the left, and find their farm on the wall map. In this example, the Flannagan, Olson, and Geigel cheesemaking operations are pictured and the map to the right should give you an idea of how two of them became "Flannagan-Olson." The moral of the story is, you will miss a lot, sometimes the most important clues, by just looking at records. Find out what your ancestors did for a living, look for museums & historical organizations dedicated to that craft, and visit the local museums in their town.
Photo © Maura Mackowski 2019
Photo © Maura Mackowski 2019
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