Indiana Nurses, Coach Wooden, and the Underground Railroad

The Spring/Summer issue of The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections has a wide variety of articles for Indiana-minded researchers and maybe even non-researchers.

Three Morgan County experts present the first installment of a series on the family and early life of legendary basketball coach John Wooden (1910-2010), based on new documents, and correcting some previous reports.

Editor M. Teresa Baer gives a list of the records indexed and abstracted by the late Jane Eaglesfield Darlington (1928-2012). You may have seen her name while wandering the library. I've benefited most from her transcriptions of local tax records, but I had no idea that she had produced at least one year for 17 different counties: Fayette (1842), Greene (1843), Harrison (1844), Dearborn (1842), part of Franklin (1822), Marion (1842), Marshall (1843), Morgan (1840), Noble (1847), Perry (1824-1826, 1828-1829, 1832, 1835-1837, 1840-1843, 1845), Posey (1842), Scott (1839), Spencer (1846), Switzerland (1843), Tippecanoe (1848), Vigo (1828), and Whitley (1841).

In "Escaping Slavery," Jeannie Regan-Dinius has an easy-to-follow history of the Underground Railroad in Indiana, a history of the research on it, and a how-to guide on how to pursue the research. Court records are often critical.

Indiana State Archives volunteers Ruth May and Sandy Ricketts describe the on-line indexes at Indiana Digital Archives for several now-closed nurses training schools in Bloomington (1906-1946), Vincennes (1908-1959), South Bend (1907-1975), Indianapolis (1899-1932), Goshen (1909-1938), South Bend (1894-1988), Terre Haute (1900-1965), Evansville (1914-1955), and Indianapolis (1883-1980). The extracted data on line is a small fraction of what can be ordered from the archives provided that the records are 75 years old or more.

It would be interesting to be able to view and compare all the various state genealogy publications. After the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, this one has to stand near the top.


M. Teresa Baer, "Jane Eaglesfield Darlington: A Bibliography of Works by a Master Indexer of Hoosier Records,"The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012):4-5.

Curtis H. Tomak, Joanne Raetz Stuttgen, and Norma J. Tomak, "John Wooden: A Revised Beginning," Part 1, The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012):6-14.

Jeannie Regan-Dinius, "Escaping Slavery: Discovering Indiana's Underground Railroad Connections," The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012):15-25.

Ruth May and Sandy Ricketts, "Nurses' Records: The Indiana State Archives Houses Records for closed Indiana Nursing Schools and Indexes Them Online," The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012):57-61.

Harold Henderson, "Indiana Nurses, Coach Wooden, and the Underground Railroad," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]