The benefits of being a wishy-washy genealogist

My article entitled "Indecision as a Genealogical Virtue" has been published at Archives.com. It includes several examples of how we can create brick walls by clinging too dearly to our assumptions or premature conclusions. A genealogist who can entertain multiple possibilities while continuing to research is likely to be a happier genealogist in the end.

Most examples are from my own research. Dawne Slater-Putt kindly allowed me to summarize and quote from a case she recently worked on and posted as "Perseverance Pays Off" in the blog of the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.


Harold Henderson, "The benefits of being a wishy-washy genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

NGS Day 3 Friday May 10

For logistical reasons only, Friday was my last real day at the conference. Please refer to other bloggers for Saturday!

My day began about 6 am in the nearly deserted free internet area (no problem with too many connections) and segued into the invitational FamilySearch breakfast (assigned tables and assigned places at each), where we learned that they add about 1.7 million new records per day, are desperately in search of Italian-speaking volunteer indexers, and are exploring ways to adapt facial-recognition software to word recognition as a way of indexing handwritten documents.

Dawne Slater-Putt's 8 am talk, "Fail! When the Record Is Wrong," was a boon to note-takers in that she spoke clearly and not too fast. Her bouquet of original records giving direct but erroneous evidence was striking. Takeaway: "Know your ancestor as a person so as not to be blinded by incorrect evidence."

I spent the rest of the morning in a New York intensive. NYGBR co-editor Karen Mauer Green emphasized the difficulties researchers from record-rich areas like New England and the Midwest will find in New York, where some record types are missing, and each of the 62 counties was to some extent a law unto itself. "Clerks essentially did what they want . . . plan to start over with each new county." A substantial aid in this process, the New York Family History Research Guide and Gazetteer, is forthcoming later this year.

NYGBR co-editor Laura DeGrazia gave a more upbeat perspective on the same situation, showing some of the records finds there to be made, such as town clerks' Civil War registers that can include time and place of birth and parents' names. I concluded that New York is the mother of innovative research techniques. And I have to say that if you must leave home for days to hang out in a desert filled with casinos in order to learn about genealogy, there is just no better place to be than in the front row of the hall, hearing DeGrazia and trading thoughts and wisecracks with Kimberly Powell and Michael Hait.

Melinda Henningfield and I chatted with visitors to the APG table in the exhibit area during the lunch hour, and then I retreated to become ready for my 4 pm talk on a Chicago-to-Ohio case study. The evening saw a meeting of mentors in preparation for the early June debut of small discussion groups on Tom Jones's popular new book Mastering Genealogical Proof, being organized by Angela McGhie.

And I know just from syllabus browsing that I had to miss great talks by Debbie Parker Wayne on DNA and Elizabeth Shown Mills on discoveries in the details.

It's now five years since my first NGS conference and I haven't even come close to regretting attending one yet. Don't miss it when it comes within your travel area.



Harold Henderson, "NGS Day 3 Friday May 10," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 May 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

From the blogs: 14-year-old fathers, on-line yearbooks, 1790 in western Massachusetts, and more

I can't read all the blogs or pick the best posts, but here are some recent items I enjoyed.

* The Plausibility Police! Dawne Slater-Putt at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center was confronted with two different 14-year-old "fathers" in one day of work. Here's how she ascertained the facts in the first case and in the second.

* If you want a publishable research challenge but don't want to get into a lot of writing, check out your own and all your friends' and relations' trees for an under-documented resident of western Massachusetts in 1790 -- and then check out the New England Historic Genealogical Society's project.You will be edited, but that's a good thing!

* On-line yearbooks are getting common, but here's a bouquet from Loyola University (Chicago).

* Get thee to a law library for a legal-history closeup on black people in court in South after the Civil War. "This article draws on more than 600 higher court cases in eight southern states to show that African Americans succeeded in litigating certain kinds of civil cases against white southerners in southern appellate courts between 1865 and 1920." Hat tip to the Legal History Blog.

* Do you worship history? Debunk it? Or use it as a tool to "fluff out" your trees? Here's Diane Haddad's take at Family Tree magazine's blog.



Harold Henderson, "From the blogs: 14-year-old fathers, on-line yearbooks . . .," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

To finish the job, go off-line

Experienced genealogists frequently admonish novices, "Not everything is on line." We're usually thinking of manuscripts, or the wall-high shelves of books in county offices, many not even microfilmed yet. But we can't even complete as simple a task as locating old newspapers entirely on line.

Recently I needed to locate newspapers published in November 1915 in three adjacent Indiana counties: Blackford, Delaware, and Jay. None of these are on line anywhere that I have looked.

Always my first place to check is the Indiana State Library's "Indiana Newspapers Holdings Guide," and I found a total of FOUR titles, just waiting for me the next time I get to visit the biggest collection of Indiana newspapers on earth.

Piece of cake, right? Not if I had stopped there.

Next I went "across the street" (as if I were in Indy!) and found a FIFTH title at the Indiana Historical Society.

Then I went to my own listing of newspaper microfilms held at the Mishawaka Penn Harris Public Library Heritage Center and found a SIXTH (significantly closer to home than Indianapolis for me).

Nothing more at the Library of Congress.

Done yet? Not so much. Then I went off-line.

I remembered that in her new book on Indiana research (part of the NGS series on Genealogy in the States) Dawne Slater-Putt mentioned a book, Indiana Newspaper Bibliography. This book is not on line; I had to check it out of my local public library. Sure enough, the compilers had located a SEVENTH title, held only at the Blackford County Historical Society (whose web site is not specific about what dates they hold) -- and an EIGHTH, held only at the Jay County Recorder's office.

Of course, Indiana Newspaper Bibliography was published in 1982, and the papers may have migrated since. But as far as I know, no on-line resource for Indiana newspapers matches this 30-year-old book.

Genealogy doesn't get a lot simpler than looking up where old newspapers are. But in order to do the job right -- in order to find 100% of what I was looking for instead of just 75% -- I couldn't rest content with the information available on line.



John W. Miller, Indiana Newspaper Bibliography (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1982).


Harold Henderson, "To finish the job, go off-line," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

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.]

More Midwesterners in NYGBR

For those who enjoy national-level publications -- but enjoy them even more when they contain Midwesterners! -- the October issue of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (vol. 142, no. 4) includes the second and final installment of Dawne Slater-Putt's "John and Elizabeth (Halbert) Blair of Ontario and Yates Counties, New York." Descendants of theirs are identified in Michigan (Lapeer and Wayne counties), Ohio (Williams, Portage, and Summit counties), and Illinois (Henry County) -- as well as in the California Gold Rush.

Midwesterners in the new NYGBR

Indiana has an author in the new July 2011 issue of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, of the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, chronicles John and Elizabeth (Halbert) Blair of Ontario and Yates Counties, New York. John was a Massachusetts minuteman and quite possibly was also involved in Shays' rebellion prior to his move to western New York.

This article is only the first installment, but already Blair descendants with various surnames are traced into Ohio (Crawford, Defiance, Geauga, Richland, and Williams counties), Indiana (Allen and La Porte counties), Michigan (Hillsdale and Monroe counties), Iowa (Allamakee, Clayton, and Decatur counties); and Kansas (Osage County).

Required reading for those who don't use deeds

Among its many other offerings, the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center has a blog. Recently librarian Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, contributed a two-part post, "Digging into Deed Records," full of examples of genealogical information of all kinds that can be found in deeds -- and in some cases can only be found there.

IMO -- she didn't put it this way at all! -- genealogists who don't use this readily available record type are cheating themselves, and quite possibly creating their own brick walls.

Indiana Genealogist December 2010

The current issue of the Indiana Genealogist quarterly is the last one you'll see in print, unless you print it out from your computer, reports editor Rebecca E. Tomerlin of Valparaiso. Indiana Genealogical Society members can view this issue and later ones in PDF format.

The issue contains more than twenty items, including a number of good pictures of Indiana soldiers' graves and memorials in Tennessee, and much more. My eye was caught by two footnoted articles and a "lost" record retrieved:

Dawne Slater-Putt, "Establishing a Possible Identity of Ford Myers: a Fort Wayne Photo Subject," an especially good detective story if you've ever sighed over an orphaned photo in an antique shop.

Penelope Mathiesen, "Burgoon Church and the Burgoon Family in Monroe County, Indiana" -- the family donated land to the Baptist church but were not members; the children moved and married elsewhere but several returned for burial.

Marjorie Weiler-Powell's find of a complete family record of James and Grace (Cade) Davis in the Dearborn County Circuit Court records for 14 July 1829, under the heading, "Register of Free Persons of Color."

She's Everywhere! She's Everywhere!

News item #1: The new Hoosier Genealogist (September, volume 21, issue 3) -- available in good genealogy libraries everywhere, and in the members-only section of the Indiana Genealogical Society along with over 300 databases -- includes "The Jeffries-Robinson/Roberson Family, Allen & Whitley Counties, Indiana," a heavily documented seventeen-page account of four generations of this mixed-race family from the 1780s into the 1900s. (Note that aside from its other merits, the article is titled to maximize the information indexed in PERSI.)

News item #2: The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne has just announced an online database of information on Indiana deaths prior to 1882 (when the state started public registration of deaths). Much of the underlying information is available at the center. (The database allows fuzzy, exact, or Soundex matching. It does not allow wild cards, browsing, or searching by anything besides first and last names. It does have this interesting property: if you type in any combination of one or more letters in either name box, it will produce up to 1,000 listings of death records for people whose names contain those letters next to each other in that sequence anywhere within it. Think about it.)

Genealogy Center librarian Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, is the author of #1 and compiler of #2. What will she think of next?

June 2010 Indiana Genealogist

The latest issue of Indiana's genealogical quarterly, under new editor Laura Pinhey of Bloomington, has two records-based articles by Meredith Thompson, one on delayed birth records (a potential resource for births 1860-1930) with a list of counties whose records have been microfilmed and identifiably labeled by the Family History Library, the other on using probate records as a good substitute for vital records. Dawne Slater-Putt offers some clippings from Kokomo newspapers 1919-1941 on the city's minor-league offerings in the old Negro Leagues of baseball. The issue is available on line in PDF format to members.

Twenty of the issue's fifty-four pages are devoted to lists: members of the Indiana State Teachers Association attending the 1882 annual meeting in Indianapolis, and male inhabitants of Liberty (1937) and Morgan (1943) townships in Porter County. Of course, back in the day it was essential for state and local publications to print these sorts of lists, but they look like dinosaurs in the age of online databases. The Indiana society is a national leader in posting databases on its web site, now up to 288 (with more quite possibly added since this was written); these would have fit there perfectly well.

If more of us Indiana members had produced articles about our research, they could have occupied that space in the quarterly, added to its value, and been eligible for a $500 prize. Can we crowd the editor's mailbox?

Got Evangelicals?

Writing in the September 30 issue of Allen County Public Library's email-zine "Genealogy Gems" (issues through 2008 archived here), Dawne Slater-Putt calls attention to the library's complete run of the Evangelical Church's periodical, the Evangelical Messenger, published weekly from 1848 to 1946. The library has two partial indexes of obituaries appearing in EM, one in print by David Koss abstracting obituaries 1848-1866 and named A-Schnerr, the other on line by Anne Dallas Budd, Rita Bone Kopp, and Sally Zody Spreng, covering 1893-1913 and growing. Those of us who visit this great library frequently may lose sight of its growing virtual presence.

That picture on the June NGSQ cover

Those of us who read both the Indiana Genealogist and the National Genealogical Society Quarterly had a serious "deja vu" when the current NGSQ arrived in the mail. Where had we seen that haunting cover photo before of Jessie (Fordyce) Krinn, husband George, son Donald, and daughter Berneil?

We saw it in the June issue of IG, where Dawne Slater-Putt laid out the full tale of a tough research project that could only go so far in "Who Was Not Jessie's Father?"

June Indiana Genealogist

Three big articles in the new issue of Indiana Genealogist, flagship publication of the Indiana Genealogical Society:

"Who Was Not Jessie's Father?" by Dawne Slater-Putt. The author, who is a Certified Genealogist, takes on puzzle of the parentage of Jessie Armentha Fordyce, daughter of Martha A. Saxon and, as it turns out, neither of the two men she married. Jessie was born 15 January 1883 in Miami County, and was five months old when her mother married Melchior Elsenhans.

"New History of the 99th Indiana Infantry," compiled by Meredith Thompson from the 1900 book of that title. In addition to a quick summary, the article reunites the sketches and photographs of some of the 942 men in the company. Company members came from the NW quadrant of the state.

In the regular "In-Genious" section, Marjorie Weiler-Powell distinguishes indexing, abstracting, extracting, transcribing, and translating.

In the latest news, a man from Danville, Illinois, is the first person to have three certified ancestors who served from Indiana in the Civil War, making him the first "triple" member of the Society of Civil War Families of Indiana.

Indiana identities in NGSQ

We're used to reading technical articles about ferreting out who's who in colonial New England. The new (December) issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly (available in many libraries, but on-line only to members) brings an eastern Indiana detective story of the same kind by Dawne Slater-Putt, M.L.S., CG, of Huntertown.

It starts with two Fayette County, Indiana, census records, and the kind of conclusion we're all tempted to jump to.

1850: Eleanor Nash, age 16, in the Fayette County, Indiana, household of Richard and Margaret.
1860: Eleanor Saxon, age 27, in the same household with three Saxon children.

Eleanor must've married a Saxon and been widowed, right? Well, Fayette County records show no such marriage, and they do show Eleanor Nash marrying a Joseph Turner in 1857. Uh-oh.

This is the point where most amateurs throw up their hands and look for another line to study. Slater-Putt is a pro, and she finds the answer after "research on extended Nash and Saxon families in several counties in two states and careful evidence analysis," laid out in nine closely reasoned pages of text. No spoilers here, and yes, it's technical, but it's exactly what we need in order to make sure we're telling stories about the right ancestors.