Moderately Recent Blog Posts I Have Enjoyed #2

Diana Dretske at Illuminating Lake County History posted a detailed appreciation of John Easton's 1844-1846 store ledger from the hamlet of Half Day. I became acquainted with the ledger's transcription when I had a research interest in the immediate area; I was unaware of its near-obliteration when the purchasers of Easton's property later used it as a scrapbook in which to post newspaper clippings! Good reading and images both for people interested in Lake County, Illinois, or in the enormous potential of this under-used resource.

The indefatigable Judy Russell at The Legal Genealogist asks the key question of relevant Ancestry.com officials. She doesn't put it this way, but I will: Since Ancestry's advertising often does not encourage genealogical education, and since it hosts many erroneous trees, how can the company hope to make clear the limitations of its new autosomal DNA test when test results are being connected to those same erroneous trees? Is this anything more than the 21st-century version of pasting scrapbook items onto a potentially valuable genealogy resource and just making everyone more confused than before? If you think I'm over the top on this, Judy is more judicious than I and has done her homework. Read her post and draw your own conclusions.

In an earlier post I uncritically repeated Ancestry.com's statement at Wednesday night's NGS conference reception that the company has 10 billion records. James Tanner at Genealogy's Star does some badly needed investigation and finds this kind of claim to be more promotional than informational.

Please note: I am a long-time and continuing subscriber to Ancestry and have benefited enormously from its work. But it should be possible to earn a profit and educate the public at the same time, and I believe that genealogists in general (and professionals and bloggers in particular) have a role to play in encouraging its executives to keep both objectives clearly in view.


Harold Henderson, "Moderately Recent Blog Posts I Have Enjoyed #2" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Real meetings and virtual genealogy

Successful corporations like Southwest Airlines say it; moribund dinosaurs like Sears say it too, because it's true: "Thank you for choosing us. We know you have many choices."

The same is true in genealogy. Genealogy meetings have lower attendance now than they did ten or twenty years ago. Partly it's because many genealogists wrongly believe they can find everything worth finding about their families on line. Partly it's because many genealogy societies proceed much as if it were still 1989 -- or 1949! -- and wonder why their attendance is dwindling.

But I'm not here to whine about that. People have more choices now than they did then -- deal with it!

Recently my wife was peripherally involved in a local church fund-raising event tied to the centennial of the 1912 Titanic disaster. (That whole craze gave me the creeps, but I'm not here to whine about that either.) The church in question is a diminished congregation chained to a massive century-old edifice in need of equally massive renovation. Many free events had generated little help. In this case, they held a 1912-costume ball with thematically appropriate music and asked the attendees to (a) dress up in period style and (b) fork over $45.

An hour before it opened there was line of well-dressed chatty people out into the street!

Morals for us: (1) Insofar as possible, cater to what people really want. It may not be brain surgery, but our local society tripled our usual attendance with a 1940 census program. (2) And consider having a party and charging more for it!

As to the Titanic angle, I especially admire Lake County Historian Diana Dretske's post on the subject for responding to the public craze and still tying it to real genealogy.



Diana Dretske, "Titanic's Lake County Passengers," 12 April 2012, Illuminating Lake County History, Lake County Discovery Museum (http://lakecountyhistory.blogspot.com : accessed 23 April 2012).


Harold Henderson, “Real meetings and virtual genealogy” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you mention it on line.]

Waukegan's Sesquicentennial?

Evidently this is going to be Catching Up With Fellow Midwestern Bloggers week. Diana Dretske at the Lake County (Illinois) Museum and Archives posted on Lake County seat Waukegan's 150th anniversary as a city. Of course its actual age as an identifiable place goes back at least to 1695. Her Illuminating Lake County, Illinois History blog is consistently festooned with wonderful images from that history.

Illuminating Lake County Illinois History

That's a new more-or-less-twice-a-week blog by Diana Dretske in her capacity as collections coordinator for the Lake County, Illinois, history archives outside Wauconda: Illuminating Lake County, Illinois History. Like its neighbor the colorful Lake County Discovery Museum and its virtual neighbor the Curt Teich Postcard Archives, the archives are under the umbrella of the Lake County Forest Preserves.

My research lately has kept me coming back to Lake County (which FYI is in the extreme upper-right-hand corner of Illinois, squeezed between Chicago and Wisconsin and fronting on Lake Michigan), so I may be biased or just zoned out from too many two-hour commutes across the Chicago metropolitan area, but I found the material quite interesting.

Recent history posts include looks back at JFK's 1960 campaign swing through the county; Swan School in Fremont Township, a sample of the archives' holdings of material on 52 local schools, most now gone; the North Shore Line; and one of Lake County's funnier products, Jack Benny of Waukegan.

Genealogists with young descendants to entertain can make strategic simultaneous use of the museum and archives (not to mention the beautiful forest preserve grounds). As with any archive, do your homework and call ahead to arrange a productive visit.