ROAD TRIP! The Things We Carry

Last week members of the APG members and TGF lists talked about what people take with them when researching at the repository or the cemetery. My fourteen-item list remains a work in progress and it reflects the fact that I straddle the physical/digital divide. Of course, it is possible to purchase, or to make do without almost everything on this list -- except the final two items. But "making do" takes precious time.

* Maintenance materials: water to drink, aspirin or equivalent, a snack depending on schedule, a book to read in case there's an unpredicted long wait.

* Shoulder bag to contain pretty much everything else listed below. Sometimes this will be my laptop bag, with the power cord and everything else crammed into it, sometimes another bag in addition or instead of that. This has a compartment for storing photocopies where (once labeled) they can lie flat, in order, and in peace during the trip.

* Laptop and power cord. I don't use it much on courthouse trips (often there's no space) but if I'm going to a library or other place with wi-fi I'll at least catch up on email.

* Blank spiral-bound notebook. For use where space is limited or when I don't have time to boot up the laptop. My computer notes are more legible and more easily uploaded to Dropbox, but sometimes the old way works best. Pages are perforated so that they can be removed and placed in binders by subject and thus promptly reunited with any photocopies or computer notes that belong with them.

* Pens -- and pencils, just in case. In my experience, archives that (wisely) require pencils also provide them.

* Calendar containing itinerary (and directions if needed).

* Relevant maps or directions. GPS is fine but I try not to be without the appropriate state atlas (we use DeLorme) because I usually want to have an overview, not just a path. If it's a county I've been to before I may have a really detailed local map in my map drawer!

* Thumb drive(s). Bring more than one if there's any possibility that you absent-mindedly filled up one! Digital images straight from microfilm (whether there's a charge or not) are a wonderful thing.

* Cell phone and charger. Sometimes the phone doesn't realize it's short of power until I actually try to make a call.

* Change purse packed with mainly dimes and quarters. My local library has good microfilm printers that ONLY accept dimes. Those at the Indiana State Library ONLY accept quarters. The copiers at Allen County Public Library ONLY accept special cards that are filled by using bills, not change. And sometimes I'm headed for a repository or a parking situation where I don't know the quirks.

* Digital camera with battery charger. Useful for documents in some situations, and it's rarely a mistake to take pictures of courthouses etc.

* Hat, coat, raincoat, umbrella as dictated by the weather. In my experience, extreme weather is much commoner in cemeteries than anywhere else.

* Most importantly, my "shopping list" of questions to be answered and relevant resources to be sought, organized first by repository and then by project. For places with good on-line catalogs this can get very specific.

* Of equal importance, as much information as possible to consult in case of surprises during the day -- such as names and dates of the research target's family members and other contextual information that suddenly turns out to be important. The best and most compact such companion may be the actual research report in progress and (hopefully) up to date. At less organized times it may have to be a couple of binders, or relevant files and images and emails downloaded to the laptop (in case of need when wi-fi isn't around).

What would you add or subtract?



Photo credit: darastar's photostream, http://www.flickr.com/photos/darastar/1253839973/ : accessed 7 October 2012, per Creative Commons.

Harold Henderson, "ROAD TRIP! The Things We Carry," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Genealogy in Other Parts of the Library

Genealogists who visit the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center from out of town, such as me, may make the mistake of thinking that the genealogy part is the whole library. Even those of us who notice the other departments may miss the fact that they contain useful genealogical material too. Here are three from my experience:

Microfilmed editions of the Methodist publication Western Christian Advocate (published 1834-1929) are held in the reference division of Readers' Service Reference (on the first floor).

Physical copies of early local laws passed by the Indiana General Assembly (1828-1835, 1839, 1844-1852) are in the Indiana Documents part of Business and Technology Reference, at the opposite end of the second floor from genealogy. They are not uniformly catalogued in the library catalog, however.

The monumental compilation of summary figures of the agriculture schedule of the 1860 US census, J. C. G. Kennedy's Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 317.3 F51GA, is also in the business department. It's a good tool for comparing ancestors and others at that time. (It's also available on Google Books if that format is manageable for you.)



Harold Henderson, "Genealogy in Other Parts of the Library," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

From the blogs: 14-year-old fathers, on-line yearbooks, 1790 in western Massachusetts, and more

I can't read all the blogs or pick the best posts, but here are some recent items I enjoyed.

* The Plausibility Police! Dawne Slater-Putt at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center was confronted with two different 14-year-old "fathers" in one day of work. Here's how she ascertained the facts in the first case and in the second.

* If you want a publishable research challenge but don't want to get into a lot of writing, check out your own and all your friends' and relations' trees for an under-documented resident of western Massachusetts in 1790 -- and then check out the New England Historic Genealogical Society's project.You will be edited, but that's a good thing!

* On-line yearbooks are getting common, but here's a bouquet from Loyola University (Chicago).

* Get thee to a law library for a legal-history closeup on black people in court in South after the Civil War. "This article draws on more than 600 higher court cases in eight southern states to show that African Americans succeeded in litigating certain kinds of civil cases against white southerners in southern appellate courts between 1865 and 1920." Hat tip to the Legal History Blog.

* Do you worship history? Debunk it? Or use it as a tool to "fluff out" your trees? Here's Diane Haddad's take at Family Tree magazine's blog.



Harold Henderson, "From the blogs: 14-year-old fathers, on-line yearbooks . . .," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Michigan Small City Directories Content and Index

There's still something cruelly tempting about an inadequately labeled box of microfilm! For those who don't recall my previous posts on this topic, I recently discovered (by accident, while looking at Texas) that the admirable "City Directories of the United States" series includes a few boxes for most states that are labeled only with the state name and a date range. The only way to find out what's in them is to scroll through and look, which can be a pain when your target may not be there at all!

Michigan has seven such boxes, and microfilmed therein are a scattering of directories from the early 1900s for smaller cities that didn't have continuous runs (or at least appear not to -- check locally before concluding that!). I went through and found that these films contain 39 directories covering 37 communities and six counties for the first third of the 1900s. Each film is identified both by its long CDUS number and by its short Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center number (where I encounter them); that plus the item number within specifies each directory. (Most city directories at Allen County are well labeled and catalogued in their microtext catalog.)

I worked from the title pages and did not analyze the contents of each directory. It could well be that some of them cover more of the surrounding rural county than expected. In all cases, there is hope that additional directories may be held locally.

Over at MidwestRoots I have posted the item-by-item, film-by-film listing, followed by an alphabetical index by community or county and time, running from Allegan in 1921 to Sturgis in 1934. (If you get lost just go to midwestroots.net and hit the top menu for "Unfindables" or the entry for Michigan on the list of categories on the right-hand side.) Happy hunting!


Harold Henderson, “Michigan Small City Directories Content and Index” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FHL microfilms already in the Midwest

Family History Library microfilms are not for sale, but local Family History Centers often have individual microfilms on “indefinite loan.” You can view on-line lists of such films held at Family History Centers in Wilmette, Illinois, and in Valparaiso, Indiana. The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center in Fort Wayne also has such a collection housed in its microtext area. Over at Midwest Roots I have listed the films in the Genealogy Center by number as of 2 April 2012. Suggestions and corrections are welcome.


Harold Henderson, “FHL microfilms already in the Midwest,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if prefer.]

Illinois Small City Directories Contents and Index

There's still something cruelly tempting about an inadequately labeled box of microfilm! For those who don't recall my February 25 Indiana post on this topic, I recently discovered that the admirable "City Directories of the United States" series includes a few boxes for most states that are labeled only with the state name and a date range. The only way to find out what's in them is to scroll through and look, which can be a pain when your target may not be there at all!

Illinois has 12 such boxes, and microfilmed therein are a scattering of directories from the early 1900s for smaller cities that didn't have continuous runs (or at least appear not to -- check locally before concluding that!). I went through and found that these films contain 66 directories covering 100 communities in 22 counties for the first third of the 1900s. Each film is identified both by its long CDUS number and by its short Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center number (where I encounter them); that plus the item number within specifies each directory. (Most city directories at Allen County are well labeled and catalogued in their microtext catalog.)

I worked from the title pages and did not analyze the contents of each directory. It could well be that some of them have more coverage of the surrounding rural county than expected. Several of these directories are for neighborhoods of Chicago. In all cases, there is hope that if you visit or consult locally you may find additional directories that the microfilmers missed.

Over at MidwestRoots I have posted the item-by-item, film-by-film listing, followed by an alphabetical index by community or county and time, running from Addison in 1915-1916 to Winfield in 1924-1925. (If you get lost just go to midwestroots.net and hit the tab for Illinois small city directories.) Happy hunting!

Fall 2011 Ohio Genealogy News and NARA M850!

There's always more than you expect in Ohio Genealogy News. The current issue has a lead article by Dan Reigle explaining the Veterans Administration Pension Payment Cards, 1907-1933, National Archives microfilm publication M850. A collaboration between the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne and Internet Archive has digitized these cards. They are browseable, not searchable, but there is a finding aid posted on the Warren County, Ohio, GenWeb project. If you've read this far, you need to join the Ohio Genealogical Society, get a copy of OGN, and peruse Dan's detailed case study of how to use this underpublicized on-line resource.

Required reading for those who don't use deeds

Among its many other offerings, the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center has a blog. Recently librarian Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, contributed a two-part post, "Digging into Deed Records," full of examples of genealogical information of all kinds that can be found in deeds -- and in some cases can only be found there.

IMO -- she didn't put it this way at all! -- genealogists who don't use this readily available record type are cheating themselves, and quite possibly creating their own brick walls.

Meta-resources

Today's topic is "records about records" -- how cool is that?

Midwestern researchers should be familiar with the WPA county records inventories from the late 1930s. They do not exist for all counties but are valuable when they do -- at least you know what was available then and where it was. (If you're not familiar, the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center has the Allen County inventory on line.)

For those who have New York forebears, one of the assets that state has is a set of county-level inventories done out of Cornell University in the 1980s. The generic title is "Guide to Historical Resources in Generic County, New York, Repositories." They are funny-shaped books with an idiosyncratic format, but your time with them will not be wasted. Really good genealogical libraries such as Allen County and the Wisconsin State Historical Society have them, but be careful how you search on WorldCat, as sometimes they are catalogued without the commas.

Sometimes there's no substitute for bricks and mortar

Recently I visited the William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, a free-standing portion of the Eckhart Public Library in Auburn, DeKalb County, Indiana. If you have ancestors in the tri-state area where Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan converge, and they might have been in DeKalb, this is the place to start. Call first (they're opening an hour later these days than the web site says), and come prepared. The main library catalog is helpful in determining their holdings ahead of time. I can tell you they include local newspapers on microfilm and a wealth of vital and cemetery records and indexes, as well as vertical files and a plenty of school censuses and yearbooks. Few of these items are on line. And it's a beautiful and friendly place to work.

Not every county has a local philanthropist this generous, but more and more have their own unique go-to place. And it can be called many names. In some places it's a historical society, in others a genealogical society, in others it is in the local library. You won't know unless you ask.

Depending on the nature of your quest, the courthouse may be the next stop, which in Auburn isn't far at all. And if your research targets created some more records across a county or state line, it doesn't hurt any that the Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center is a half-hour's drive south on I-69.

Methodology Monday with upstate New York in Allen County Public Library

Plenty of Midwesterners came from, or through, New York -- and in doing so created multiple migraines for their descendants who have to cope with a gigantic state that has few statewide record sets for the 19th century (always excepting those wonderful state censuses).

John Beatty, writing in the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's monthly e-zine "Genealogy Gems" for November 30, offers an introduction to using the 185-roll microfilm collection of New York State DAR transcribed records, largely of cemeteries, vital records, and Bible records. (If the direct link doesn't work, start here. This is the genealogy center's microtext catalog, for which their elegant new AquaBrowser catalog is NOT a substitute!) Back issues through 2009 and a free electronic subscription form are also available here.

You do want to read this article before jumping in, as the arrangement and indexing is not quite state of the art. But sooner or later, you're going to have to crack a New York family. Why not now?

Women Teachers on the Frontier

Sometimes the problem is not so much locating a source, but knowing that such a source even exists in the first place! My son turned up Polly Welts Kaufman's Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) in connection with his history project, but it's also an interesting kind of genealogy source. I didn't find it on Google Books or Internet Archive, but hard copies are available at reasonable prices on AbeBooks. And Worldcat shows many copies in Midwestern libraries, both public and college.

The book is not some simplified narrative, it's a publication directly derived from relatively little-known original sources, in this case records of the National Popular Education Board of the 1850s, residing largely in the Connecticut Historical Society -- diaries and letters of women teachers who seized the opportunity to go on their own to the frontier, earn a living, and help civilize and bring Protestantism to it.

Don't expect to find your New England or New York ancestress here (although that is possible). Do expect to find outsider accounts of the Midwestern frontier, especially in Indiana and Illinois -- and do also expect take into account their inevitable bias toward "uplift" and a certain brand of religion.

A similar source that I had already heard of and looked into are the letters from men in the American Home Missionary Society. For more information on them, you can start where I did, with John Beatty's article in the September 2007 issue of the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's e-zine "Genealogy Gems."

Check BOTH catalogs before going to Fort Wayne!

The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's new "Aqua Browser" catalog has interesting features, but it has not closed an important gap. It covers the microform collection only slightly better than the previous catalog did (which was not at all). You will miss some great and unexpected research opportunities if you don't also check the previous microtext catalog, which is still available here. (To navigate, go to the handsome new Genealogy Center site, pull down the databases menu, choose "free databases," and click on the fifth item down.)

Just by way of example, the new catalog does not hint at the fact that the library holds many sets of Ohio counties' early tax records.

"Smart Catalog" coming to Fort Wayne

One of the Midwest's premier research destinations will roll out a new on-line catalog system this Thursday! See the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's video on their blog.

On first viewing of the video, I'm excited about having a visible search trail and alerts via RSS feeds. I'm hopeful that this new system will make it possible to unify the Genealogy Center's microtext catalog with the main catalog in searching -- and that it will make it easier to figure out the proper configuration of words for subject searches, especially geographical ones. And I hope that the ability to view books title by title as they appear on the physical shelves will be preserved.

Good thoughts from other blogs

I've been enjoying the "Daily Genealogist" from NEHGS, AKA the New England Historic Genealogical Society, AKA "HisGen" -- in particular Michael J. LeClerc's heart-rending tale in the issue of 1 September. If that doesn't get you motivated to keep track of family treasures, perhaps you have no relatives at all!

In the 31 August (issue #78) e-newsletter "Genealogy Gems" from the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Steven W. Myers alerts us to the existence of The Gerritsen Collection of Women’s History, 1543-1945. It's a source useful for historical context that also contains genealogically specific materials as well. English-language portions are at the Genealogy Center on microfiche. Check their online microtext catalog, but really, just go there!

ProGenealogists' blog continues as useful as it was before the firm was purchased by Ancestry.com. In the 31 August post, Sherry Lindsay asks, "Why does this record exist?" and gives some generic answers for common record types. But this should remain a live question in every case, because particular records may have additional interesting reasons for being created.

In general I like any question that shakes us out of our routine and makes us relate those dusty, scrawly, faded records back to the lives they touched -- like, "Just how did those two ever meet in the first place, much less get married?" Even questions that can't be answered can make you think different.

She's Everywhere! She's Everywhere!

News item #1: The new Hoosier Genealogist (September, volume 21, issue 3) -- available in good genealogy libraries everywhere, and in the members-only section of the Indiana Genealogical Society along with over 300 databases -- includes "The Jeffries-Robinson/Roberson Family, Allen & Whitley Counties, Indiana," a heavily documented seventeen-page account of four generations of this mixed-race family from the 1780s into the 1900s. (Note that aside from its other merits, the article is titled to maximize the information indexed in PERSI.)

News item #2: The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne has just announced an online database of information on Indiana deaths prior to 1882 (when the state started public registration of deaths). Much of the underlying information is available at the center. (The database allows fuzzy, exact, or Soundex matching. It does not allow wild cards, browsing, or searching by anything besides first and last names. It does have this interesting property: if you type in any combination of one or more letters in either name box, it will produce up to 1,000 listings of death records for people whose names contain those letters next to each other in that sequence anywhere within it. Think about it.)

Genealogy Center librarian Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, is the author of #1 and compiler of #2. What will she think of next?

Learn more about Indiana vital records

Did you know that the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library has a blog in addition to the monthly e-zine "Genealogy Gems"? Well, it does, and the most recent post, by John, advances our knowledge of how to work with Indiana vital records sources, especially in Lake and Allen counties, two of the most populous in the state.

One thing we almost always learn from such careful examinations is that the popular derivative sources (in this case the typescript WPA indexes and the Ancestry.com database derived from them) are not always complete, or as simple to use as one might think. There's more going on here than the usual problem of derivative sources being copied at several removes from the original records. Check it out!

More ways to learn about Fort Wayne

The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library has its own blog -- not to be confused with its e-newsletter. Check out the April 5 post. They have a 363-volume unindexed set of family research papers -- but there is a way to search for significant mentions of families by using the catalog.

Detroit social history for your genealogy

The Allen County Public Library's free e-zine "Genealogy Gems" comes to my mailbox on the last day of every month. Most welcome in this month's issue was John D. Beatty's explanation of why the genealogy department carries a lot of social history. In writing up his family, he used

Richard J. Oestreicher’s book, Solidarity and
Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit,
1875-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), and Olivier
Zunz’s The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial
Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), both offered statistics on the
numbers of immigrants in Detroit, placing immigration in the context
of other Midwestern cities. Oestreicher also compared the wages of
skilled laborers by occupation versus unskilled laborers. No, my
immigrant ancestors were not mentioned by name in these books, but I
gained a better understanding of the ethnic German east-side
neighborhood where they resided.

I should look into these sources for my grandmother's brother's family and in-laws who grew up in Detroit.

More ways to get to Fort Wayne

The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library has its own blog and a Facebook page, as well as an e-newsletter "Genealogy Gems" previously noted here. Blog and Facebook offer links to three important resources at the library: the main catalog, the separate microtext catalog, and the online databases. The socially inclined can become fans.