More Midwesterners in NYGBR

For those who enjoy national-level publications -- but enjoy them even more when they contain Midwesterners! -- the October issue of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (vol. 142, no. 4) includes the second and final installment of Dawne Slater-Putt's "John and Elizabeth (Halbert) Blair of Ontario and Yates Counties, New York." Descendants of theirs are identified in Michigan (Lapeer and Wayne counties), Ohio (Williams, Portage, and Summit counties), and Illinois (Henry County) -- as well as in the California Gold Rush.

New Midwestern research resources

From Rootsweb's Cook County mailing list, a listing and map of current Chicago Catholic parishes. It's more than a year old and I didn't observe a source, but I may not have looked in all the right nooks and crannies.

From ChicagoGenealogy.com, Ancestry's new index for Chicago marriages 1912-1924, also apparently unsourced. Cynthia also has the latest on Sam Fink's index, and if that's an unfamiliar name to you, check out the post.

From the University of South Carolina Libraries Digital Collections via the Scout Report, an indexed and mapped version of the Spring 1956 edition of Victor H. Green's The Negro Traveler's Green Book -- a necessary guide for safe travels in the Midwest and everywhere else during the later days of Jim Crow.

From Southwest Michigan Genealogy and Local History, a print resource available only in person at the Van Buren District Library in Decatur, Michigan: a seven-year run of the Tri-County Telephone Company's Sales News, published from South Haven 1932-1939, complete with employee biographies and more.

Two of the Best Genealogy Blogs Going

The Demanding Genealogist by Barbara J. Mathews of Connecticut (methodology) -- for instance, "Playing Dominos: The Illumination of the Non-Authoritative."

Deb's Delvings by Debbie Parker Wayne of Texas (specializing in law and genetics) -- for instance, "Research, Proof Standards, and DNA Testing" -- also her posts on these topics on the Transitional Genealogists Forum.

Both blogs are by Certified Genealogists, but the reason they're both high up on my home page is that I never read them without learning something.

Midwesterners aplenty in September NGSQ

Three of the five main articles in the current National Genealogical Society Quarterly feature Midwesterners.

* The issue's premier logical puzzle -- "Finding a Man's Past Through His Children: Four Wives of John C. Fawkner of Kentucky and Indiana" -- is J. H. Fonkert's 20-page romp through indirect evidence tracking Fawkner through four marriages from Orange County, Virginia, to Kentucky and finally to Hendricks County, Indiana.

* Lynne Fisher correlates incomplete records to identify the Baden origins of Ludwig Fischer (1809-1875) of Wayne County, Michigan, and Cook County, Illinois.

* Ruth Randall tracks escaped slaves Washington and Lewis Giboney from Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, to Berrien County, Michigan . . . and back again.