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

From the far north end of the Midwest

Thanks to Jessica's Genejournal for pointing to an elegant blog orchestrated by Ceil Wendt Jensen, CG, "The Polish Pioneers of Calumet, Michigan." Calumet was a mining town about halfway up the Keeweenaw Peninsula, which sticks out into Lake Superior on the north side of Michigan's Upper Peninsulra. The blog "explores the Polish community of Calumet, Houghton Co., Michigan. They were not the largest ethnic group -- but many Midwestern families trace their ancestry back to a miner in Calumet." I especially like the map showing some of their ancestral villages near Poznan.

No danger of sentimentalizing this place. A recent post transcribes the records for Andrzei Adamski, a "drill boy" born in 1875 and killed 17 Dec 1889 or 1890 by an "explosion of dynamite." The year 1889 appears on the gravestone and mine accident report; it's 1890 in the county death returns. Go figure.