Michigan -- another reason to attend FGS 2013 in Fort Wayne

[Reposted from the FGS 2013 conference blog.]

Is Michigan on your way to or from the 2013 FGS conference in Fort Wayne? Well, if it's not, you may need to consider making a cooling northward detour. Your trip begins . . . at these libraries and archives.

Van Buren District Library
200 North Phelps, Decatur
http://www.vbrgs.org/LocalHistoryDepartment.html
A lot of library in a small package.

Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collections
East Hall #111, Kalamazoo
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/
Library AND archives for southwestern counties.

Archives of Michigan
702 West Kalamazoo, Lansing
http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-54463_19313---,00.html
Their circulars alone are worth a virtual trip:
http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,4570,7-153-54463_54475_20992---,00.html

Library of Michigan
702 West Kalamazoo, Lansing
http://www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan/0,2351,7-160-18635---,00.html
Multiple resources for your Michigan research even if you don't get beyond their web page.

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library
5201 Woodward, Detroit
http://www.detroit.lib.mi.us/featuredcollection/burton-historical-collection
Over 4,000 manuscript collections, plus maps and photographs extending outward from Detroit and
deep into its multicultural past.

Michigan county clerks and archival blog

I've long been a grateful consumer of the Indiana Genealogical Society's very thorough county research address list. Now I learn that Michigan is growing the same thing (despite its disadvantage of not having a strong statewide organization) at the Archives of Michigan web site, a GoogleMap of county clerks. (I'm a little suspicious of that link; if it doesn't work, go here and follow.)

And if you've been keeping up with The Anecdotal Archivist blog byMark Harvey, you knew this.

The ultimate Michigan Civil War resource

You're going to be sorry your ancestors didn't all flock to Michigan to join the Union Army...

I blundered into a fantastic archival collection on line at Seeking Michigan -- digital images of original Civil War records in 1486 folders, each containing (as far as I looked) between 25 and 85 documents. According to the collection description, "The records document the history of Michigan soldiers in the form of muster rolls, letters, lists of dead, monthly returns and other materials sent to the state Adjutant General during the war. Funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission." The Library of Michigan and the Archives of Michigan and the Leota and Talbert Abrams Foundation are involved.

If you have a research target who served in a Michigan unit in the war, and you know which one, you can conduct archival research on him from your desktop. (From the lists I saw it's obvious that many men not living in Michigan saw service there.) The interface isn't ideal, but if you click on printable version, that image is much easier to navigate and very detailed.

I can't tell if this is everything, but it's enormous. It's not indexed but it is organized by unit. Folder titles are searchable so browsing is probably the way to get started. To browse this collection, hit "advanced search," in that window move "Civil War Records" from the box on the left to the box on the right," and hit search. And pretty much wherever you land you'll find a surprise. I just found a bunch of Mexican War records!

Getting down to business in Michigan

Jasia, world's liveliest genealogy blogger, laments in a comment yesterday not getting much help finding business records in the Mitten State. I found one place to start on line, but clearly you'd have to go there, and what they have might not necessarily be what you need -- that's the way with archives.

The Archives of Michigan enumerates more than 100 businesses for which they have something in this circular (all these circulars are PDF files).

Of course it won't include her grandfather's baking company unless those records were saved and donated there. Maybe they weren't kept. Or maybe they were donated to another archive, closer to home. Or maybe they're still moldering away in some relative's attic! (I have a research target that was a Michigan business for years, but its archives, to the extent they exist, are across the lake in Wisconsin because the business later moved.)

Looks like you might have better luck if your research target was a Michigan corporation, because they had to file reports to the state starting in 1840. Here's the Archives of Michigan's corporation circular, but it doesn't name them all. Looks like lotsa microfilm, the 1840-1980 index alone runs 25 reels. Obviously it'd be a big help to know when your targets were in business there.

But that's not all. The Archives also has circulars indicating their holdings in shipping and navigation; mining; lumbering, logging, and forestry (including some payrolls); licensed professions (auctioneers and ferry masters go way back); and account books and ledgers (including individuals, churches, societies; some going back to 1813). Yee haw!

Michigan's Abrams Genealogy Seminar July 25-26

In the absence of the usual statewide genealogy organization, the Library of Michigan is a key institution holding that state's genealogy community together. It's sponsoring a day-and-a-half seminar in Lansing July 25-26 that anyone with research targets in Michigan will want to consider. Just a sampling of the topics to be covered:

• finding Revolutionary War ancestors at the Library of Michigan

• Michigan township records, "a genealogical gold mine"

• Treasures of the Archives of Michigan

• the digitization project for state death records 1897-1920

• the Local History and Genealogical Collection of the Public Library of Saginaw (PDF)

• Ceil Wendt Jensen, CG, on newspaper research

• the Local History and Genealogy Department at Loutit District Library in Grand Haven