New on-line resources

On the Porter County, Indiana, Genweb:

917 records from the Indiana Adjutant General's List of Porter County Civil War Soldiers

11,364 individuals residing in Lake Porter counties in 1916, with their addresses and credit ratings

From the St. Clair County, Illinois, mailing list:

Diane Walsh calls attention to the free online 1926 volumes by Isaac D. Rawlings in the Internet Archive, The Rise and Fall of Disease in Illinois, volume 1 and volume 2. Much of the book culls old medical journals for reports of diseases in specific places and times. With some effort it may be possible to retrieve copies of the original articles themselves for an unusual close-up on your location of interest. He covers the whole state and some adjacent counties as well if they happened to be written up by an Illinois physician.

St. Clair County Illinois Quarterly #4 of 2008

Like most ambitious state and regional publications, the St. Clair County Genealogical Society Quarterly welcomes actual articles, but still subsists largely on a diet of transcribed records. Why not write up your southwestern Illinois ancestors for them?

In issue #4 of 2008:

"Extracts from Death Register Book II, 2 January 1886 - 6 July 1886, tr. Melinda Cahill and Diane Walsh

"Marriage Index 1911," tr. Judy Phelps

"Document Conservation," an information-packed one-page summary of a recent society meeting where former Belleville Public Library archivist Patricia Hamilton spoke.

"Military Discharges 'L'," tr. Art Rubeck and Sheila Kronenberger

"Plan, Analyze, Begin Again: A Davis Family Example," by Diane Walsh. At the Salt Lake Institute last month I complained a bit about the lack of information about how to do research planning beyond the stage of brainstorming and list-making; this article is the beginning of an answer, as the quarterly editor takes us through an actual research situation and shows how to respond to new information, when to focus on the task at hand and when to draw back and make a note of an alternative path to perhaps be followed later.