The collection contains extensive financial data on the business activities of members of the Barland-Schlegelmilch family, but no information at all on the role that members of the family may have played in the political or social life of the Eau Claire area. The Schlegelmilch Family records are divided into eight sub-series. The Genealogical Materials include official documents and unofficial information on the ancestry of Herrmann Schlegelmilch and his wife Auguste Kroger Schlegelmilch. The Schlegelmilch Family Business and Financial records contain documentation on the family's activities as hardware merchants and moneylenders, and on their personal finances. Business and Financial records are all in volume form, but were not kept in a systematic manner.
Many volumes contain more than one type of record.
The container list attempts to list each type of record within the individual volumes or folders. Dora Schlegelmilch's correspondence is juvenilia plus hastily written letters to her adult siblings or to her children. The Louise Schlegelmilch files include intermittent correspondence from 1871 to 1923, and provide an exceptionally good look into the Schlegelmilch family. Eda Schlegelmilch, who died in 1893 at age twenty, is represented by a thin folder of her correspondence and letter fragments. The John C. Barland record series is divided into three subgroups.