Two more tempting books

Published just in time for the National Genealogical Society's gathering earlier this month in Cincinnati is Indiana by Dawne Slater-Putt. It's part of the NGS Research in the States Series. (Actually, it's so new it's not in NGS's on-line store yet.) It starts with accounts of early Indiana history and settlement and account of major archives, libraries and societies. The bulk of the book describes the following two dozen types of resources:

Aids to Research
Atlases, Gazetteers, and Maps
Bibles
Biographical Sources
Business and Occupational Records
Cemetery Records
Censuses and Census Substitutes
Church Records
Court Records
Directories
Ethnic Groups and Records
Genealogical and Historical Periodicals
Institutional and Prison Records
Internal Improvements
Land Records
Military Records
Naturalization and Immigration
Newspapers
Probate Records
School Records
Tax Records
Vital Records
Voter and Election Records
Women

I bought this book at NGS, have already read it from cover to cover, and look forward to referring to it often in the future. It will be available in either hard copy or PDF. I can imagine a few minor improvements for later editions, but I can't imagine having written such a comprehensive book myself.


Reviewed in the online magazine of early American history, Common-Place: David Jaffee's A New Nation of Goods, focusing on pre-Civil-War rural northeast and New England. Emory University historian Jonathan Prude writes,

Jaffee combines the specialized expertise of an antiquarian with the more capacious concerns of an historian. Thus, heeding antiquarian impulses, he recounts precisely how clocks, tables, and chairs were fabricated; he provides biographies of many who did the fabricating; and he traces the provenance of a good number of the resulting artifacts.

"Antiquarian" is rarely a term of praise among historians. But given my microhistorical and genealogical interests, that word puts this book pretty high up on my want list.



Dawne Slater-Putt, Indiana (Arlington VA: National Genealogical Society, 2012).

David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

Harold Henderson, "More tempting books," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Resources from Michigan, Kokomo, Common-Place, and Randy Seaver

In a 28 February post, "X Marks the Spot", on his blog, Kris Rzepczynski shows a fascinating new dimension of Seeking Michigan's 1897-1920 death records. Your research target may have death certificates in two different jurisdictions!

The on-line journal of early American history, Common-Place, has a good critical review of Alan Taylor's recent history of the War of 1812 -- an awesome book if you have any interest in the war at all.

In NEHGS's "Weekly Genealogist," the indefatigable Valerie Beaudrault points us to the Kokomo library's on-line index to the 7439 burial records of the Rich Funeral Home there 1893-1956. (That's Howard County, Indiana.)

Those wrestling with how to work with conflicting pieces of evidence in commercial genealogy database programs will want to check out Randy Seaver's typically and laudably transparent presentation of his own work over at Genea-Musings.

Civil War Memory and more

The on-line general-interest history journal Common-Place is always interesting, but this is special. I can see that it's going to open up a bunch more blogs for me to keep an eye on!

Eavesdrop on the historians

Need some quick reconnaissance on the latest historical books? Check out H-Net Reviews. You won't always find the titles you want, but when you do your colleagues will wonder how you got to be the first to know.

Also keep an eye on the online historical magazine Common-Place, which is doing additional reviews now. Matthew Mason highlights Charles Ball's 1837 autobiographical account of the internal US slave trade. Readily available on line, it "matches better-known slave narratives both in the adventure of his escapes and the power of his testament to slave resistance," and it reinforces current scholarship which focuses more on this trade than on the plantation.

Common-Place the online history magazine

Check out the January issue of Common-Place for background and even some methods. Not much directly pertaining to the Midwest in this issue, but Christopher Grasso gives a lengthy preview of his book on how belief and unbelief wove together in the US in the early 1800s. If you want hard-core research, click on Eastern Illinois University professor Charles R. Foy's article, "Uncovering Hidden Lives," whose work in archives on both sides of the pond has helped produce the Colored Mariner Database (not yet on line) of almost 10,000 African American, Native American, or mixed-race Atlantic mariners in the 1700s. For instance:

A compilation of naval records had provided me with the story of four slave sailors on a ship from St. Thomas who found themselves in Portsmouth during the American Revolution due to a broken ship rudder. The seamen convinced naval officials of their rights under the English law not to be forced to continue to work as slaves on the ship. The case was particularly interesting because it involved slave sailors from throughout the Atlantic: North America, the British West Indies, Calabar, and St. Thomas. But what happened to these men once they left the ship in Portsmouth was unknown. A review of court, tax, land, and church records in the Portsmouth City Records Office provided no information on the men. However, a search of records for warships in Portsmouth at the time the men landed there yielded a significant discovery: one of the men had been subsequently impressed onto a naval ship! While we might not know the details of these men's lives after they gained their freedom, the fate of this unfortunate sailor reminds us that in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American maritime world, freedom from enslavement did not always mean freedom from coerced labor.

Surely this is where the always-permeable border between genealogy and history dissolves altogether.

Also don't miss Byron Le Beau's discussion of Currier & Ives's not terribly realistic but still informative visual record of the 19th century including the Civil War.

Dred Scott's descendants

Genealogy and history work together to recover the full story of Dred Scott, the subject of the notorious 1857 US Supreme Court decision, who died in St. Louis and who has numerous living descendants. Read the article in the new issue of the online journal Common-Place.