Not All History Is Created Equal

World War II brought 20,000 jobs to rural La Porte County, where the county seat had a total population of only 16,000. Workers commuted up to 90 miles round trip per day to assemble explosive shells. The Kingsbury ordnance plant did hire black workers, largely from Gary, but it segregated them in lowly jobs (and separate bomb shelters!) and discriminated against them in workplace discipline. Nor were they allowed to live in the "new town" of Kingsford Heights near the plant.

Historian Katherine Turk has documented the situation in the new issue of the Indiana Magazine of History, drawing among other sources on files of employee letters to President and Mrs. Roosevelt and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, held at the National Archives in Chicago. It's not a pretty picture, and not one you'll hear much about in La Porte County today.

Turk's research interest is in documenting that the African American women's logic involved both equality and fairness, whereas later anti-discrimination laws tended to leave out the fairness part. My interest is in the power of local forgetting: how little is remembered of the virulent white racism that led the government bureaucrats and the contracting company alike to discriminate against black workers and lie to them about it. (Most responses to complaints were pro forma; one woman was turned away because the company doctor said she had high blood pressure, which her own doctor documented was not the case.) The plant would recruit as far away as North Dakota and Georgia rather than allow a black person to work in a job designated for whites.

Placing our ancestors in historical context involves being aware of uncomfortable issues and situations that now go unmentioned. Sometimes it takes an outside historian to pay attention to a part of the picture that local historians turn away from.



Katherine Turk, "'A Fair Chance To Do My Part of Work': Black Women, War Work, and Rights Claims at the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant," Indiana Magazine of Hisotry, vol. 108, no. 3 (September 2012): 209-44.

Harold Henderson, "Not All History Is Created Equal," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Slavery and emancipation resources in Illinois

Dave Bakke, a columnist for the State Journal-Register newspaper in Springfield, Illinois (home of this September's FGS meeting), has called attention to the state archives' database of servitude and emancipation records (1722-1863). The database (not new) includes information from a variety of sources in nine southern Illinois counties on 1301 men and 929 women, and instructions on how to obtain the original records there indexed.

The same column brings news that University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde is working on a book about slaves in the Land of Lincoln, and in the process helping upgrade the database. She'd like to see it include, for instance, material documenting the role of African-Americans in the lead mining district that includes Jo Daviess County in the state's far northwestern corner.

In her background reading, it sounds like VanderVelde is learning what genealogists should already know: that the late-19th and early-20th-century county histories are far from inclusive. "Many of the frontier histories have been whitewashed, creating an ‘amnesia’ about the slaves and indentured servants in free states.” While culling them for clues and additional sources, we would be ill advised to rely on them for information on anyone who wasn't prominent or conventional, or on the outline of the history they tell.

Summer Hoosier Genealogist

Lots of good stuff in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, from the Indiana Historical Society:

"Research Serendipity," by Sharon Ogzewalla

"A Popular Outlet for Spare Time," by Mary Owen, on Indiana women's clubs from about a century ago

"'To Make Up a Soldier's Life," by Rachel M. Popma -- letters to the Tipton Times from Spanish-American War soldiers

"Court Papers: Abstracts of the Delaware County Legal Documents in the Barnes Manuscripts collection, 1864-1892," by Wendy L. Adams and Melinda Moore Weaver

"Prescriptions, Poetry, and Prose: The William Daviess Hutchings Papers, Scott and Jefferson Counties, 1855-1914," by Geneil Breeze

"Hoosier Baptists, Part 1: Anti-slavery Associations, 1826-18302 and African American Associations and Death Notices from Annual Minutes, 1848-1912", by Timothy Mohon

"The Crooks Family" by Constantina Lyla Spath (Delaware County)

"The Indianapolis Gardeners Benefit Society," by Cathy Born

Mitchems of Harrison County, Indiana

You might recognize Harrison County as the home of Indiana's first state capital, Corydon. But did you know it was also home to a group of emancipated black slaves even before statehood? In the spring issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, descendant Maxine F. Brown sketches out the story of Paul and Susannah Mitchem of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and finally Indiana. They freed dozens of slaves, and many of the emancipation papers are in early Harrison County deed records. Many of these people took the Mitchem name, so it could be a severe genealogical challenge to sort these folks out. Associated surnames Brown mentions include Meachum, Vincent/Vinsett, Carter, Cousin, Finley, and Powell.

PERSI tells me that Kentucky Ancestors did a several-part series on this story back in the 1990s; I don't know if anyone has dug into it from a genealogical as well as a historical point of view. Another starting place would be the 54 prominent signatories (not named in this article) to a letter to the then territorial governor, complaining that free black people were being "lry loose among us." The Northwest Territory was free by law, but that didn't mean the white people there were particularly enlightened.

Of Migrations and Swimming Pools: Book Reviews at H-Net Online

Two book reviews from social history spotlight books that can illuminate genealogy too:

Jeannette Keith reviews Jack S. Blocker's A Little More Freedom: African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860-1930. It's clear the book contains much detail on the northward migrations of African Americans, including case studies of their lives in Washington Court House (Fayette County), Ohio; Springfield (Clark County), Ohio; and Springfield (Sangamon County), Illinois. He also discusses lynchings and race riots. In the words of the reviewer, "In their reaction to antiblack collective violence, African Americans in the Midwest demonstrated that they did indeed have a little more freedom than they might have had in the South. Black newspapers crusaded against mob rule, as did black self-help groups ranging from Sunday school conferences to women's clubs. Most strikingly, African Americans armed themselves for collective self-defense." The review is detailed and the book promises more.

Christopher J. Manganiello reviews Jeff Wiltse's Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. Your immigrant ancestors may have played a role in getting municipal swimming pools started. The reviewer summarizes: "Boisterous and naked working-class boys and men bathed in Philadelphia, Boston, and Milwaukee rivers because urban tenement housing offered limited indoor facilities. When these bathers offended Gilded Age citizens’ Victorian sensibilities, reformers justified the establishment of bathing pools on public health arguments."

Ohio libraries smackdown

The spring 2008 issue of Ohio Genealogy News pushes the upcoming annual conference (April 17-19 in Cincinnati) and describes the online images of state death certificates 1908-1953 now available, but most of the issue is devoted to three libraries: Columbus Metropolitan, Cincinnati Public, and new acquisitions by the Ohio Genealogical Society's own library in Mansfield (and the capital campaign to build a new one).

Columbus now holds the State Library of Ohio's genealogy collection as well as its own. (I should add that SLO still holds some relevant historical materials and the agricultural schedules of the US Census, as well as a very occasional genealogy blog.) Columbus also has the Ohio Huguenot Society collection and a microfilm every-name index to 130 Ohio county histories.

The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, long famed for the quality of its genealogy collection, has the River History Collection (including the Rivers photograph wiki), and what it describes as "the leading African American research collection in the nation, including Antebellum Southern Plantation Records, Regimental Histories of U.S. Colored Troops, and more. Its virtual library includes scanned images of Cincinnati city directories as early as 1819.

In short? It's hard to make a wrong turn in this state.