Was Your Ancestor Entered in a Better Baby Contest?

The Ultimate History Project has a brief interesting article on the mixed heritage and results of Better Baby Contests that were all the rage just about a century ago. Babies were weighed and scored on a number of supposedly scientific criteria; often there was an anti-immigrant or anti-black subtext to the movement at a time when eugenics had not yet become a dirty word.

But genealogists devour everything. These contests are another potential source of information, as contestants and winners were sometimes pictured and identified in local newspapers. The above article about a Missouri contest appeared in the Quincy (Illinois) Daily Journal in 1915 -- thanks to the Quincy Public Library's awesome newspaper archive. I have seen BBCs with pictures spread across an entire page of a small-town newspaper.



Rachel Louise Moran, "Making Perfect Children," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/better-babies.html : accessed 25 March 2013).

"Additional Awards in Palmyra Round-Up," Quincy Daily Journal, (Quincy, Illinois), Thursday 23 December 1915, p. 8; digital image, Quincy Public Library Newspaper Archive (http://www.quincylibrary.org/library_resources/newspaperArchive.asp : accessed 26 March 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Was Your Ancestor Entered in a Better Baby Contest?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Many Lives of GW Edison Jr. -- NGSQ Genealogy Olympics

We expect records to be occasionally mistaken, but few of us expect our ancestors to lie repeatedly. When they do, we have to step our research methodology up a notch. That's what Tom Jones did in the fourth of four articles in the amazing June 2012 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. (I've already posted on the Pratt, Hackenberger, and Northamer articles.)

Those of us who enrolled in the first Advanced Evidence Practicum at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy in January got to wrestle with this problem for a day, in confidence, prior to publication. I think I'm safe in saying that it pinned most of us to the mat.

The individual in question -- George Wellington Edison Jr. (1861-1940) -- came from a good family and often held a skilled job. He also, in Jones's words, "used four names, married five times, was divorced twice, committed bigamy once, and had twelve children." Raised in Quincy, Adams County, Illinois, he bounced around Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana, helped build the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and died in Decatur, Macon County, Illinois.

Genealogists tracking an accomplished con man like this need to be wary, maintain a broad focus, and constantly test and correlate information from a variety of sources. For the specifics and the many intriguing sub-problems, I encourage you to read and reread!



Thomas W. Jones, "Misleading Records Debunked: The Surprising Case of George Wellington Edison Jr.," National Genealogical Society Quarterly vol. 100, no. 2 (June 2012):133-56.


Harold Henderson, "The Many Lives of GW Edison Jr. -- NGSQ Genealogy Olympics," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Midwesterners in NGS Magazine July-September

Didn't we just get a new NGS Magazine? And now here's another one, the July-September issue, including David W. Jackson with excellent guidance on migration research, featuring David McCord Campbell of Clayton, Adams County, Illinois, at whose house Lincoln is said to have stopped during his circuit-riding days.

Equally fun is Anne J. Miller's case study of Charles and Polly (Jones) Colton, long supposed to have died around 1820 in Cayuga County, New York. Information from an 1833 probate "resurrected" them and led researchers on a chase to Livingston and Oakland counties in Michigan.

Western Illinois books digitized

from Illinois Harvest, with individual links:

I remember you, or, Quincy men who are Quincy doers for the good..., by J. St. Bernard (~1912).

Portrait and biographical record of Adams County, Illinois... (Chicago: Chapman Brothers, 1892)

Quincy and Adams County, history and representative men, in 2 volumes continuously paginated (Chicago and New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1919)

and, moving south down between the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers:

Portrait and biographical album of Pike and Calhoun counties, Illinois... (Chicago: Biographical Publishing Company, 1891)

History of Pike County, Illinois... (Chicago: Chas. C. Chapman & Co., 1880)

Old newspapers in Quincy and on your desktop

I'm a big fan of Michael John Neill, not because he's from western Illinois too, but because he weaves genealogy lessons so neatly into the stories of his own ongoing research. In this recent post on his rootdig.com site, he points out that while many big-name pay-for-view genealogy sources have collected old newspapers and made them searchable, they aren't the only place to look.

All genealogy is local. Neill reports that the Quincy Public Library in Adams County, Illinois, has "scanned old Quincy area newspapers from the microfilm, and created a digital database that can be searched."

And all genealogy is global: if you're lucky enough to have research targets in western Illinois between 1835 and 1890, you can search for them here. (Oops, "Please note that the Archive may not function properly using Mozilla Firefox.") FYI, the first paper they have for this old river town is the 17 Apr 1835 issue of the Illinois Bounty Land Register.