Two New 2018 Publications

Not everyone gets to be named Alissomon. She was the sister of my wife's 3-great grandfather Henry Mozley; their families emigrated together from Nottinghamshire, England, to Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1833. The Mozleys eventually spread out from Erie in many directions; Alissomon married shoemaker Joseph Harrison and their offspring stayed closer to the Great Lakes. 

My article follows them downstream in the current OGS quarterly. Ohio will have its annual conference later this week in Columbus -- it's not too late!

Working downstream in time has its benefits. Because I was also researching the more populous Mozley side, I discovered a letter from a Mozley relative briefly describing her visit to three Harrison cousins in Cleveland around 1910.

New York and Ohio members can read the new issues of their respective quarterlies on line, and not have to wait for the mail.

(Soon to come: revealing the life of a practiced deceiver.)

“Alissomon Mozley Harrison and Her Descendants in Erie and Cleveland,” Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly 58(1), 2018:49-61.

Review of  American Settlements and Migrations: A Primer for Genealogists and Family Historians by Lloyd Bockstruck, New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 14(2), April 2018: 156-57.

New online death records and indexes

Joe Beine has additional death records and indexes posted. For our five-state Midwestern focus, they are:

Illinois: Boone and Cook counties

Michigan: Ottawa County

Ohio: Cleveland



Harold Henderson, "New online death records and indexes," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Good news for Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri researchers!

Five new or expanded Midwestern collections on FamilySearch in the last 2 days:

Illinois -- Lee County

Missouri -- Cole County

Ohio -- Trumbull County and Cleveland

Wisconsin -- 1865 state census

ProQuest Historical Newspapers(TM) in Academic Libraries

Genealogy is local, but we're not. Often we need access to newspapers in distant places. Some digitized titles are available by subscription. Some subscriptions are not available or affordable to individuals. ProQuest is one such, and in my experience libraries tend to subscribe to it just for their own localities if at all.

Here's where academic libraries can help the determined researcher, even if he or she is not formally affiliated there. Those libraries that allow the public (most, in my experience) have not only scholarly article databases like JStor, they may also subscribe to an interesting variety of ProQuest Historical Newspapers (TM), which has impressive runs of 38 titles. Those of particular Midwestern import in the ProQuest fold are the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Defender, Cleveland Call and Post, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Louisville Courier Journal, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Public computers at one Midwestern university library recently had about half of the 38 titles listed at the above link. These were not for printing out or emailing, however, so be prepared to take notes the old-fashioned way. In actual use the titles are not consistent, so a continuous run of an Atlanta paper, for instance, actually involves several titles, not all of them alphabetized under "A."


UPDATE POSTED MONDAY MORNING: Over on the Transitional Genealogists Forum, Michele Lewis just posted word of a useful low-budget resource for those seeking on-line newspapers, on Wikipedia. And of course, being Wikipedia, it's a resource we can all contribute to.

Harold Henderson, "ProQuest Historical Newspapers(TM) in Academic Libraries," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Ohio Genealogy News Winter 2011

"Have You Researched Your Ancestor's Mental Health?" is the cover headline on the new OGS News, the class of the state-level newsletters. Among the contents:

Lisa Long (Ohio Historical Society reference archivist), "Mental Health Records: An Introduction for Researchers" and "Selected List of Patient Records in the Ohio History Center." Don't get your hopes up -- asylum and mental health records are "restricted" no matter how old, according to state law (insert your joke here about the lunatics running the asylum), but there are a variety of workarounds.

Deb Cyprych, "Return of Deaf and Dumb, Blind, Insane and Idiotic Persons in Ohio, 1856" -- a township-level partial census, many of the entries including parents' names.

Susan Zacharias, "Searching the Dead in Stark County: Coroner's Records Online."

Beverly R. Austin and Ronald L. Burdick, "Cleveland Public Library's Genealogy Resources."

Wally Huskonen, "Getting Ready to Research in the 1940 Census," including several tips for identifying enumeration districts as we await its indexing.

OGS Quarterly Fall 2011

Documented articles and research guides from the Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly, from the nation's largest state genealogical society:

Sharon Alwart, "Thomas and Jane Stephens, Coshocton County Pioneers." This article provoked me to reflect on how and why we attribute emotions to people living 200 years ago who left no record of how they felt. It is difficult for us to imagine a time when personal feelings may not have been the most important things.

Rachel Dilley, "Pietism's Last Stand," an account of Crawford County's Chatfield Evangelical Pietist Church.

Mary Jo Howard, "The Untold Story of Eugene and Kittie Howard" -- a terrible and long-suppressed tale of Cleveland in 1902. Looks like OGSQ is on a roll with tales that go "beyond the black sheep." (I'm thinking of Kathleen Reed's research tale in the summer issue.)

Deborah Crowdy, "Coshocton County Locality Guide." This listing goes both ways, listing eight repositories in the county and information about five kinds of records. UGA's Crossroads has also been publishing some of these as well.

Thomas Stephen Neel, "Richland County, Ohio, Road Petitions, 1817-1820." Road records in general are underused, but when they contain the names of all the petitioners, I'd say they're scandalously underused!

Ohio Genealogy News Spring 2011

The Ohio Genealogy News -- the genealogy newsmagazine that outdoes some other states' quarterlies -- focuses on Civil War genealogy research this quarter. But I'd say the whole issue is worth it for explaining where to find the Cleveland District Round Table's index to the Cuyahoga County probate record images that FamilySearch has posted only in browseable form.

In other news, Ohio Genealogical Society's 50th annual conference begins later this week in Columbus. See you there!

Cleveland public cemeteries on line

Another urban Midwestern resource has come on line, the Cleveland City Cemetery Index. It's a five-year-old project of the East Cuyahoga County Genealogical Society, and it includes more than 300,000 burials at ten locations. If you know where your Cleveland person of interest wound up, you can also search individual locations. But if you don't find your person, he or she may still be buried in Cleveland . . . in a private cemetery.

Thanks to Kelly Cogan Holderbaum for her Facebook note on this.

Genealogy Bank comes through

I've been pretty hard on GenealogyBank in the past, so it's only fair to make note that today, when I needed information on an obscure hurricane on an island south of Cuba almost a century ago, the New York Times archive failed me, but GB came through with a topical article from New Orleans, background information from Cleveland, and an informative well-cited nugget from the American State Papers. It's not even 11 am and it's already a good day for genealogy!

In this case the technical feature I appreciated most was the ability to search by location, using only keywords, since the particular name was irrelevant at this stage. This ability gives the database microhistorical as well as purely genealogical value (at least as I use those words).

Western Reserve Historical Society Library

It looks like my career of driving through Cleveland without stopping may soon come to an end. Reviewing Ann Sindelar's article on the Western Reserve Historical Society for last week's post on Ohio Genealogy News led me to just books, periodicals, and manuscripts galore, but also online databases. For instance:

an index to Cleveland's 1907 voter registration records, from a time when registration was required by law. Note that the online index serves as a pointer to additional information at WRHS that is not indexed, such as the registrant's age, length of residence, and signature.

an index to marriage and death notices in the Jewish Independent and Jewish Review and Observer 1889-1964.

an index to nine volumes of Bible records copied in nine volumes at WRHS.

an index to northeast Ohio servicemen's photographs (and sometimes articles) from the Plain Dealer, 1940-1955.

There's much more, including a listing of WRHS's holdings of obsolete Ohio paper money, including "demand notes, scrip, post notes, certificates of deposit, counterfeits, capital stock and fractional currency from over 100 Ohio cities." This is statewide: I found items described from Granville, Marietta, and Kenton. (The originals are in the Vault.)

If you start digging for the really good stuff in their manuscript lists, be aware of peculiarities in the search functions. For instance, title searches are for the first word in the title; names that appear later on are not indexed. Bulldog searching will be called for.

Did your forebear make this trip in 1847?

Check out page 300 in the previously blogged Appletons' Railroad and Steamboat Companion, a summary of the five-day, 1500-mile trip from New York City to Chicago in the summer of 1847:

by boat from NYC to Albany...

by train from Albany to Buffalo (riding all night if you're in a hurry)...

and the rest of the way by "one of the large and elegant Upper Lake boats" ("ladies and gentlemen...with guns, fishing-tackle, harps, flutes, violins, and other music")...

stopping at Cleveland, Detroit, "Mackinaw," where you can try your luck at fishing "in water so clear that you can see a trout twenty feet from the surface"...

and then south down Lake Michigan to Chicago, population 16,000.

Total fare: $21.

All About Cleveland

If you have Western Reserve or Cuyahoga County ancestors and don't know about the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, it's time to get on the bus. It includes biographies, general articles, images (salt mine, anyone?), and a historical timeline (pick a number between 1 and 10 and you will have the total population of the city in 1800). There must be a map of the city's neighborhoods somewhere, but I couldn't find it. Let me know if you do!

Hat tip: Internet Scout Report

Ohio City Directories before 1850

I've blogged before about the Morgan Bibliography of Ohio Imprints, but their ongoing project of indexing all 16 city directories from the five Ohio cities that published before 1850 -- Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, and Steubenville -- deserves its own mention. These are indexes, not images. The unique advantage here is that you can search across all directories.

Fall Genealogy News from Ohio

In a timely manner, the fall issue of Ohio Genealogy News features Ohio's unxpected riches in voting records.

"Ohio Voter Records," by Deb Cyprych, gives an overview of legal milestones, followed up with specific resource lists:
"Poll Books in Ohio Genealogy" in five different repositories.
"Quadrennial Enumerations of Eligible Vioters, 1800-1907"
"1907 Cleveland Voter Registration Index" on line at the Western Reserve Historical Society.

"NewspaperArchive.com: Free Access for OGS Members," by Mark E. Schmidt

"Newspaper Collections at the Ohio Historical Society," by Elizabeth L. Plummer

"Cemetery Chronicles," by Lolita (Thayer) Guthrie

"Using Footnote -- A Powerful Internet Research Tool," by Brent Morgan

"Check the Original!" by Harold Henderson (yes, it's me), an example of the surprises that await when you go behind the transcribed 1880 census and look at the original record, along with a smidgen of Scofield genealogy.

Annals of Cleveland

The Allen County (Indiana) Public Library's monthly email newsletter, "Genealogy Gems" (back issues here), can be counted on for at least one resource find per issue. In July (yes, I am behind, thank you for asking) we find the Annals of Cleveland, a WPA-era indexing of early city newspapers and court cases as "Cleveland Newspaper Digest" 1818-76 and the "Cleveland Court Record Series" 1837-77. They're available in both microfiche and bound volumes, although the print version of the newspaper digest stops in 1858. An online taste is available here.

Downloadable book$

The latest Wholly Genes newsletter includes notices of new downloadable books (PDF) for sale, including two that treat places other than New England or the mid-Atlantic:

Jacob Piatt Dunn's 1919 Indiana and Indianans: A History of Aboriginal and Territorial Indiana and the Century of Statehood. Barbara Vines Little, CG, observes, "Researchers stopping to read a particular entry are likely to find themselves completing the chapter before moving on to the next item of interest." I observe that this every-word-searchable version is noticeably less expensive than you can get the hard copy at abebooks.com.

Rev. A. B. Cristy's 1896 Cleveland Congregationalists 1895: Historical Sketches of our Twenty-Five Churches and Missions. Again, I can't find this for even twice the price as a used physical book.

(Although I am a satisfied user of Wholly Gene's bread-and-butter database product, I have no other connection with them.)

Figgie of Cleveland

In the April issue of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Helen Schatvet Ullmann describes Patricia Law Hatcher's The Ancestry of Harry E. Figgie, Jr., of Cleveland, Ohio, as "a good model for presenting research on a diverse ancestry," in this case Swiss and English.

Northeastern Ohio heritage online

Diane Haddad at Genealogy Insider mentions Ohio's Heritage Northeast as a favorite website, and I can see why.

OHN combines into a single searchable database archival collections from Cleveland State University (the hosting institution), Akron-Summit County Public Library, Cleveland Public Library (a genealogical force in its own right, home of the excellent Cleveland Necrology File), Oberlin College Archives, Rodman Public Library (in Alliance), Westlake Porter Public Library, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Shaker Heights Public Library, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, and the Syracuse (New York) Public Library. (The last two institutions aren't in northeast Ohio, but they share relevant material.)

You can choose which of the several dozen collections to search: they run from Akron Banknotes (locally printed money from the Civil War era) to Yesterday's Lakewood, and include Cleveland postcards and ethnic groups including Blacks, Polish Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, and Hungarian Americans. Most are collections of images but there is some text. Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to tell from the collection title what you're going to get, and I haven't found a way to simply browse a collection.

Be prepared to spend some time here. I don't have a lot of folks in NE Ohio, and let's just say it's taken me quite a while to write this post!

Gems from 1844 and 1860

Illinois Harvest (previously blogged here) has recently digitized two goodies:

First, we have the 1903 "Souvenir [re]Publication" by T.F. Bohan of the General Directory and Business Advertiser of the City of Chicago for the Year 1844, with a Historical Sketch and Statistics extending from 1837 to 1844, by J. W. Norris (Chicago: Ellis & Fergus, 1844).

True to the title, the actual directory of individuals occupies only 45 of the 132 total pages; much of the rest is business cards. Somehow the history is padded out to 16 pages, including this passage from page 6: "What the destiny of Chicago is to be, the future can alone determine. Judging by the past, it seems difficult to assign a limit to its advancement." My step-grandmother's maternal-line ancestors, the then-prominent Lowe family, are well represented.

NOTE: Images of the 45 directory pages only are available at Old Directory Search, which also has Cleveland and Ohio City 1837, and Monroe (Green County), Wisconsin, 1891.

And then there's the 994-page Illinois State Business Directory 1860, compiled by Smith and DuMoulin (Chicago: J. C. W. Bailey & Co., 1860).

I'm not sure their downstate coverage is that great, but if nothing else this cross-section of business life just before the Civil War can add color to just about any Midwestern story. The list of businesses covered is worth the price of admission alone: Artificial Limbs, Mnfrs. of; Axe Helves, Mnfrs. of; Basket Makers; Bathing Saloons; Bell Hangers; Bird Stuffers; Brass Cocks and Gauges; Candle Moulds (Metallic) Mnfrs of; Chandlers; and so many more.