Is Van Buren County Michigan's best-kept genealogical secret?

Last month I finally made it to Decatur, Michigan, home of the Van Buren District Library Local History Collection in the Webster Memorial Library and the Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society of Southwest Michigan.

Don't wait as long as I did. If you have research targets in Allegan, Berrien, Cass, Kalamazoo, or Van Buren counties, this is a must-see collection. Highlights of the collection include

• vital records, 
• newspapers from the 1850s, 
• plat books as early as 1860, 
• yearbooks, 
• Sanborn fire insurance maps on microfilm, 
• an obituary collection, 
• the Bess Britton Michigan One-Room Schoolhouse Collection, and 
• the Southwest Michigan Military Registry Project. 

If you need microfilm from Salt Lake City, you can order it sent to Decatur for viewing.

The department's rooms are packed full, and I hear there are prospects of expansion.

For more details, check out my previous posts mentioning the county or society or library.



Harold Henderson, "Is Van Buren County Michigan's best-kept genealogical secret?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Midwesterners aplenty in September NGSQ

Three of the five main articles in the current National Genealogical Society Quarterly feature Midwesterners.

* The issue's premier logical puzzle -- "Finding a Man's Past Through His Children: Four Wives of John C. Fawkner of Kentucky and Indiana" -- is J. H. Fonkert's 20-page romp through indirect evidence tracking Fawkner through four marriages from Orange County, Virginia, to Kentucky and finally to Hendricks County, Indiana.

* Lynne Fisher correlates incomplete records to identify the Baden origins of Ludwig Fischer (1809-1875) of Wayne County, Michigan, and Cook County, Illinois.

* Ruth Randall tracks escaped slaves Washington and Lewis Giboney from Cape Girardeau County, Missouri, to Berrien County, Michigan . . . and back again.

Methodology Monday with multiple records

Midwestern newspapers in the 1850s were a sorry lot, genealogically speaking: weekly, four pages, half ads (few of which changed from week to week), the other half mostly boilerplate copied from other newspapers or the federal government. Local news was mainly court-required publications of notice of pending cases.

Thus the Niles (Michigan) Enquirer for November and December 1856, which I had occasion to read last week. In its last eight issues of that year, it took note of a grand total of six marriages. One involved a former resident who got married in Tennessee; another involved a couple from Racine, Wisconsin. The other four marriages were local:

16 November, R. J. H. Beall and Eleanor A. Weever (27 November issue, p. 3 col. 2)
23 November, Alfred L. Wood and Rhoda J. Fowler (27 November issue, p. 3 col. 2)
7 December, E. R. Griswold and C. Chapman (18 December issue, p. 3 col. 1)
16 December, Francis J. Hadlock and Mary Snorf (18 December issue, p. 3 col. 1)

Of course, the marriage I was actually looking for wasn't there, even though I had obtained the original record of it from the holdings of the Berrien County Historical Association a while back. How about these folks?

To my amazement, not one of these four marriages is in the BCHA collection, and only one of them (Beall-Weaver) is in the Family History Library's microfilm of the records of the County Clerk. Unless they appear in ministerial or church records, this scrap of ancient newspaper looks to be the only record of these marriages. I never would have found them at all without some sleuthing help from Sharon Carlson, director of the Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History collection in Kalamazoo. She found two years of the Enquirer, unlabeled, at the back of a microfilm there.

Don't imagine, as I did, that those newspaper marriage notes are merely a subset of the official marriage records that might contain an extra tidbit of information. They may just be your last best hope.

Part of Berrien County, Michigan, is in Kalamazoo?

Recently I quoted a non-genealogist archives user on the value of consulting with the keepers of the records -- well, the other day the advice came to life when Sharon Carlson, the director of Western Michigan University's Archives and Regional History Collections in Kalamazoo, advised me to go beyond the newspaper research I had planned and consult the index created by former director Wayne C. Mann as part of his own research.

It's actually more what I would call a "living index," because he photocopied various newspaper articles and other items, and filed one copy each under each surname mentioned in the article. No brick walls collapsed, but I found information on friends and associates of my research target that I never could have in any other way.

It's been microfilmed (43 reels!) and the Family History Library calls it "The Southern Berrien County, Michigan Index" and notes that it tends to cover the townships on either side of the state line from Rolling Prairie to South Bend on the Indiana side and Berrien and St. Joseph counties on the Michigan side. So, depending on your geographical orientation, you may wish to consult this Berrien County resource either in Kalamazoo or Salt Lake City.

(And just FYI: if you're looking for Berrien County probate court records after 1838, you'll find them, not in Kalamazoo, but in Berrien Springs at the Berrien County Historical Association, which is an archive as well.)

And You Thought You Knew the GenWeb Archives!

I had no idea until a friend forwarded an email that the GenWeb Archives includes "Penny Postcards," old postcards organized by state and county. They have cards from everywhere, and the Midwest holdings are ample.

It would appear that there are at least two kinds of postcards represented: the carefully airbrushed and tinted ones, and the (more individual and less overtly boosterish?) black-and-white images. It's these less boosterish ones that can almost stop my heart -- it really is like a Jack Finney story, a moment frozen in time, like this one from Three Oaks, Berrien County, Michigan.

You may find these little images at the end of a quest, but it could also be the beginning -- since it's often not clear just when they were taken, but at a guess I'd say most of them are around a century old.

Silverbrook Cemetery in Niles, Michigan

NEHGS e-News highlights an active cemetery restoration group in Niles, Berrien County, Michigan, the Friends of Silverbrook Cemetery. The group's stated mission is "to promote and restore Silverbrook Cemetery to its once proud heritage."

For distant genealogists, their database -- searchable by surname, given name, cemetery section, birth date, death date, burial date, or funeral home -- is a gift (as is its property of being searchable by the first few letters of a name if you're not sure of exact spelling). Its 19,494 listings are said to constitute "most" of the burials. It's not clear whether the database is derived from a cemetery reading, a record of burials, other data, or some combination -- probably some combination, as few gravestones name the funeral home.

The website also includes upcoming meeting dates, a roster of members, and a photo gallery.

Berrien County Michigan land records

Lori Jarvis, the register of deeds for the triangle-shaped southwesternmost county in Michigan, will describe the newly computerized records over which she has jurisdiction at the monthly meeting of the Berrien County Genealogical Society July 16.

Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society, Michigan

I just caught the note in the Paw Paw Courier-Leader (can't make these names up) that the Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society's annual pot luck meeting and white elephant auction is Monday night the 23rd at the society's mecca, the Webster Memorial Library in Decatur. Besides its namesake county, VBRGS covers the far-southwest Michigan counties of Allegan, Berrien, Cass, and Kalamazoo.

The society has a nice collection of online resources at the Van Buren County GenWeb site, including obituary and cemetery indexes. Its physical resources are in the Webster Library's Local History Room, and they include deed and other fundamental record indexes for several counties. (Check out their online catalog by title.) The Local History Room is itself worthy of note. It also acts as a borrowing agency for Family History Library films. This is a quality of holdings and services I don't see offered at many public libraries of this size. (Decatur's population is under 2,000.) Time to pay them a visit.

Across the ocean to Berrien County, Michigan

The internet can close the gap between continents, but leave you not knowing your neighbors. I live just minutes from Berrien County, Michigan (and yes, I have research plans there!), but until this morning I didn't know that "Juliane's granddaughter" blogs from there at Two Sides of the Ocean -- largely about her ancestral researches (surnames Schulte, Feucht, Wellhausen, Schluessler, Kijak, Rubis, Kolberg, and Kramp, from Germany, Pomerania and Poland), and sometimes also about meeting up with fellow bloggers on research trips. (You can catch up with Apple's Michigan adventures at her blog too.)