Census entries that have "DOOM" written all over them, and some good reading

Joseph M. Burdock [Burdick], 1870 U.S. census, Chicago, Cook Co., Ill., Ward 14, p. 582, dwelling 1455, family 1657: FIRE INS. AGENT.

Robert G. Turk, 1920 U.S. census, Binghamton, Broome Co., N.Y., Ward 3, Enum. Dist. 18, sheet 8B, dwelling 167, family 230: FOREMAN CITY STABLES.

What's your most doomed occupational find?

In other reading . . .

. . . the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society's blog takes a look at haunting forms of decease in old New York.

. . . those who appreciate the Napoleonic Era nautical-historical novels of Patrick O'Brian may want to check out a New-York-based novel set half a century earlier. One reviewer called Francis Spufford's Golden Hill "the best eighteenth-century novel since the eighteenth century."

. . . if you'd like to have a long leisurely dinner with a historian who knows all about what went on in the US between 1815 (end of the War of 1812) and 1848 (end of the Mexican War), you're out of luck. But you can read the book What Hath God Wrought by Daniel Walker Howe.

The sheriff's granddaughters

My step-grandmother's grandfather Samuel James Lowe (1798-1851), an immigrant from England, was sheriff of Cook County in the 1840s. He had two wives and thirteen children.

In the September issue of Indiana Genealogist, I tell the story of his two youngest daughters -- Mary Alice (Lowe) Amerman 1848-1943 and Kate (Lowe) Gilbert 1850-1928. They grew up in Onarga, Iroquois County, Illinois, and spent most of their adult years in and near East Chicago, Lake County, Indiana.

They were among the pioneers there: Kate's husband published the first newspaper and was the first postmaster, and was involved in a real-estate boom that somehow passed them by. Northwest Indiana was a lightly settled frontier 117 years ago, but a frontier with a difference: it was just a train ride away from Chicago's Loop.

This family has a lot more stories but they won't fit into an article!


“Pioneering in Chicago, Onarga, and Northwest Indiana: Lowe, Amerman, and Gilbert Families,” Indiana Genealogist 28 (September 2017): 5-16.