Could genealogists investigate how local economies disappeared in the 20th century?

Once upon a time -- about 100 years ago, when my grandparents were younger than my children are now -- small towns and small cities were real economic entities. Their very city directories were often locally (or regionally) published. Purdue historian John Lauritz Larson wrote in The State of Indiana History 2000:

"At the turn of the nineteenth century, Indianapolis and half a dozen smaller cities in Indiana boasted hundreds of factories, mostly family owned. In towns such as Lafayette, Terre Haute, Evansville, and Fort Wayne, one could buy bread flour, buggies, and even locomotives of local manufacture. Everything from automobiles to bicycles, boots, baking powder, caskets, cheese, cigars, doorknobs, furniture glassware, grits, handbags, harnesses, hats, lawn mowers, pianos, pork-and-beans, roller skates, sheet music, and wagon wheels was available -- all marked 'made in Indiana.'"

What happened? Some few entrepreneurs got big and eventually elbowed the rest out of the way -- they had easier access to capital and made things shinier and cheaper than their competitors who stayed local.

But how did it happen? What were the left-behind manufacturers thinking and doing as the levers of power moved out of town in the 1920s and 30s and 40s? What about the family capitalists? Once they were local decision-makers, who were settled for the duration and who belonged to the place -- now their "successors" run multinational corporations that have little loyalty to any particular nation, let alone any smaller place. Most local businesses (by dollar volume) are franchises or chains whose bosses have none of the same local commitment or clout.

Did someone say "family"? Actually, genealogists might be in a position to contribute to answering these questions. (To my way of thinking they are microhistorical questions, in that don't primarily deal with issues of relationship or identity, but the methods are much the same.) Studies of these families, conducted with these questions in mind, might be very interesting. It wouldn't surprise me if some have already been done. The interesting ones will stick to the facts and avoid big-picture assumptions, either positive (that it was all a painful but inevitable and wonderful change) or negative (that it was some kind of dastardly plot).



John Lauritz Larson, "'Striving after Wind': The Changing Sources of Hoosier Prosperity," pp. 249-271 [quote on p. 255], in Robert M. Taylor, Jr., ed., The State of Indiana History 2000: Papers Presented at the Indiana Historical Society's Grand Opening (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 2001).


Harold Henderson, "Could genealogists investigate how local economies disappeared in the 20th century?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Books: everyday life in three centuries

One of the pleasures of a national institute or conference is the chance to browse and buy good books. I bought the following four from Maia's Books at GRIP last week. I ended up choosing mostly books that told stories -- but that did so in a knowledgeable historical context, not just for quaintness' sake. We'll see. Hopefully this will not be the last you hear of them!

Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Most of my mother-in-law's ancestors and a fraction of my mother's and father-in-law's ancestors were around for this.

Harvey Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Parents, grandparents, and most great-grandparents were active in these years. Growing up in the 1950s was not entirely different, in that much of the built environment was still there from the 1920s, but I could easily assume similarities that were not there.

Joan M. Jensen, Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850-1925 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006). In-laws were in Wisconsin early, whether from England, New England, New York, or Pennsylvania.

David T. Hawkings, Pauper Ancestors: A Guide to the Records Created by the Poor Laws in England and Wales (Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2011). In 1819, my two-year-old great-great-grandfather's impoverished family was removed from the parish of Long Bennington in Lincolnshire to the parish of Teigh in Rutlandshire.




Harold Henderson, "Books: everyday life in three centuries," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 July  2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

1960 railroad resource (new lookup)

Last week at a local antique store I picked up a copy of issue no. 263 of The Pocket List of Railroad Officials, a book that, among other things, provides a nationwide alphabetical index of more than 20,000 railroad officials (management, NOT rank and file employees -- roughly down to local freight agents, traffic managers, and track superintendents), as of approximately the last week of July 1960.

The book includes a listing of more than 500 advertisers, companies that supplied the railroads, listed alphabetically with mid-level sales officials, such as agents of Caterpillar Tractor Co. in Waco, Joplin, Colusa, Aberdeen, and other locations.

I have not found this 1000-page booklet in libraries or on line. I've listed it at Midwest Roots among my other on-line lookups.




The Pocket List of Railroad Officials no. 263, Third Quarter 1960 (New York: The Railway Equipment and Publication Co., 1960).


Harold Henderson, "1960 railroad resource (new lookup)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

See the Mid-20th Century in Cushman Color

Hat tip to colleague Malissa Ruffner on Facebook for alerting us to Indiana University Archives' on-line collection of the photography of Charles Weever Cushman. The collection is easy to view and well categorized -- the heart is the more than 14,000 color slides from 1938 to 1969. Most-photographed years? 1965, 1952, and 1955. Most-photographed places: the US (11,374), United Kingdom (759), and Austria. Among the states, there are 4723 photographs of California, 2484 of Illinois, and 943 of Arizona. Cushman graduated from Indiana University and had some genealogical interests, so Indiana got 350, but Wisconsin (83), Ohio (20), and Michigan (6) don't get much attention. Thematically, landscape, architecture, and cityscapes are his commonest themes.

Few photos have names; many of the cityscapes, especially of Chicago, have addresses. There are some great "then and now" shots to be taken. If you want to see circuses from the 1940s, you're in luck. If you're bewildered, check out the highlights.


Harold Henderson, "See the Mid-20th Century in Cushman Color," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New at Midwest Roots and LibraryThing: Baptists, travel, and the worst of the 20th century

Last week I picked up an interesting resource for 20th-century research at Samford University library's perpetual used-book sale: the 1949 and 1950 student directories for the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Free lookups in these or my other 15 miscellaneous mostly Midwestern sources here.

Also new on my booklist at LibraryThing: Travel Accounts of Indiana, 1679-1961. So far my favorite quote comes from a Dunker Baptist head of household between La Porte and Michigan City. In 1836 he found a carriageful of travelers at his door, stranded by a flood and washed-out bridge, and greeted them cheerfully, saying: "You know you would not have staid with me, if you could have helped it; and I would not have had you, if I could have helped it; so no more words about it; but let us make ourselves comfortable." (p. 161) You just don't hear that frank talk from motels these days.

The most recent book on that booklist that I actually read straight through was Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands -- almost unendurable, but very important to tell because most published sources on World War II had access only to the Soviet or Nazi archives, not both. The total tale of the multiple deliberate mass murders in that stretch of country between Russia and Germany (including the Holocaust itself) is one of the worst stories in human history, and of course many Americans have ancestors and relatives who died there or who narrowly escaped by timely emigration earlier in the 20th century.




Directory 1949 and Directory 1950 (Louisville KY: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2825 Lexington Road).

Harriet Martineau, [June 19, 1836], in Shirley S. McCord, comp., Travel Accounts of Indiana, 1679-1961: A Collection of Observations by Wayfaring Foreigners, Itinerants, and Peripatetic Hoosiers (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1970), Indiana Historical Collections, Vol. 47. "Her comments are in Michigan History Magazine, 7 (1923):61-72, from the original Society in America (3 vols., London, 1837)."

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).


Harold Henderson, "New at Midwest Roots and LibraryThing: Baptists, travel, and the worst of the 20th century," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Sports Illustrated!

I'm making no promises, but those who have late-20th-century ancestors may want to be aware that Sports Illustrated has its entire archive back into the 1950s on line and apparently every word searchable. Advanced search options are available, and results can be refined by decade or by date.

Mid-20th-century war resource

The St. Joseph County (Indiana) Public Library has an on-line "Service Notes" database indexing almost 40,000 newspaper mentions of local people "who were being drafted, entering the service, being promoted or sent to different locations" between 1941 and 1979. It's in two parts, one for WWII, the other for Korea and Vietnam. Each can be browsed if you specify how to sort the list and a particular branch of service. The results will give name and address, but any underlying newspaper items must be retrieved from either microfilm or clipping files in the library in South Bend.

Obviously this sort of database is just a start on research, and equally obviously it won't help if your person of interest came from somewhere else. But check your relevant library -- they may have a similar card file or index that hasn't made it on line yet!

Advice for Illinois researchers

The other day I needed a Cook County death certificate from the 1940s. It appeared in the online database of Illinois death certificates 1916-1950, but not in the online database of death certificates in Cook County at the County Clerk's genealogy site.

I thought I had only three options: pay the Clerk $15 to look for it, pay the Illinois Department of Public Health $10 to look for it, or visit the Illinois State Archives in person.

I paid the clerk and waited 6 weeks, when I received a form letter to "valued customer" referring me to public health without explaining why they couldn't find a death certificate in their own jurisdiction. When I called to ask, I was referred to another number which rang 20 times without being answered.

The state Department of Public Health asserts (as if it were an ontological truth rather than an irrational quirk of state law) that death certificates are "not public records" and hence are available only to a few. It does acknowledge that it will make "genealogy" death certificates available for deaths more than 20 years ago -- and then offers only application forms that exclude the genealogy possibility.

The state archives are many hours away by car in a direction I rarely have occasion to travel.

The best option? None of the above. I logged on to Genlighten.com, looked for lookups in Springfield, Illinois, hired Molly Kennedy for less than any of the above figures, and received the desired death certificate within 1 (that's one) business day. What ever possessed me to do anything else in the first place?

Guardians and Nurses in Northwest Indiana

The seemingly indefatigable Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society has just put up two new 20th-century databases in its online archives section:

Guardian Bond Books, Lake County (1919-1934)

Register of Trained Nurses, Lake County

Each database is prefaced by a full explanation of how it came to be, how the original records were created, and where they can be found.

St. Clair County, Illinois -- where you hope your ancestors lived

One of the most active local societies in Illinois, with a sizeable web presence, is in the southwest, right across the river from St. Louis: St. Clair County. I'm a member, so don't take my word for it -- check out their stuff.

They've just announced a new free newspaper database: "Vital Statistics Extracted from the Belleville (Ill.) Daily Advocate, 1927-1954," the gift of Nancy Giles. For those of us who have ancestors after the 1930 census (!) and who are twentieth-century impaired, this is a wonderful thing. My own Flint and Thrall lines converged in St. Clair, so it's already done my database some good and I look forward to zeroing in on the original articles the next time I'm over that way.