Good news for researchers with Missouri black sheep!

Missouri now has arguably the best on-line information about prisoners, including PDFs of the log book including any identifying scars. Two other Midwestern states have transcriptions which may or may not be complete: Illinois and Indiana. (For Indiana, choose "Institution" from the drop-down menu "Record Series," then choose one of several correctional institutions from the drop-down menu "Collections." The resulting search form can be tailored for county and span of years. A null search will not work, so just go through the vowels to develop your own custom list for a given county and period.) Cyndi's List has numerous links but the actual pickings are slim.

So you definitely want your ancestral miscreants to have been caught in the Show-Me State. And while you're there, check out all the other good records Missouri is putting on line. If you state's prison records can better Missouri's, let us know in the comments.

Obituary help for southern Indiana's Scott and Clark counties

An online twofer from Jeff Harmon of Franklin:

Obituary and Death Notice Index to The Chronicle, Scott County, Indiana 1880-1978

Index of Obituary and Death Notices in Clark County, Indiana Newspapers 1872 - 1900 (by Diane Henley, in print since 1992)

Hat tip to Cyndi's List What's New.

Wisconsin's digital cornucopia

New on Cyndi's List is the web site "Kenosha County History: Images and Texts 1830s-1940s," which is awesome with eight full-text histories and more than 1300 images of people, buildings, businesses, churches, events, transportation, local government, and cityscapes in Wisconsin's southeasternmost county.

What may not be immediately obvious is that this is just one chapter out of more than three dozen in the State of Wisconsin Collection. Many are place-based, some are thematic (agriculture, maritime). If you have Wisconsin research targets, don't wait for me to highlight one chapter or the other.

May I mix you another metaphor to go with my headline? This is yet another multifaceted gem in Wisconsin's research crown.

What's old in Hamilton County, Illinois

Southern Illinois' Hamilton County (county seat McLeansboro) has a historical society whose website is new on Cyndi's List, including a listing of the society's next meeting (unfortunately in March), the location and hours of its museum and genealogical library, and its publications -- including oral histories taken in 1978 and recently transferred to CDs and made available for sale.

If you have folks in this part of the world, Linkpendium has a good set of links and the Hamilton County GenWeb site has some unusual transcriptions including state censuses of 1855 and 1865.

So it comes as rather a disappointment that out of the 36,000 or so people in my genealogy database, including a bunch of southern Illinoisans, no one (yet!) has a connection there.