You want a desecrated cemetery? I'll show you a desecrated cemetery!

Thanks to Dick Eastman for picking up the ongoing saga of the casual burial and unburial of deceased paupers and mental patients on the northwest side of Chicago in the Dunning neighborhood.

Those looking for more details (and indications that Chicago's standards may have declined over the last 30 years) can find my lengthy article, "Grave Mistake," in the archives of the Chicago Reader, 21 September 1989.  At that time it was a housing development; now it's a school. A lot has happened since then, but you get the idea.

Kosciusko County and Many Other Maps On Line

Dick Eastman broadcast a nice local digital newspaper story about the Kosciusko County, Indiana, Historical Society placing grave listings and photographs on line as part of the county's GIS mapping system for properties.

But there's more to the story: The web site is part of a multi-county service called Beacon: Local Government GIS for the Web. Kosciusko and 26 other Indiana counties also have multi-purpose zoomable GIS maps and searchable information on current properties under this format. Four counties in Illinois (Cass, Morgan, Ogle, and Whiteside), one in Michigan (Berrien), and several in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, and South Dakota also have this feature. So far as I've been able to tell, Kosciusko is the only place going the extra mile with the cemetery database and images bonus. (So it is now possible to cross-check these against other on-line listings such as Find a Grave, as well as non-digital published readings.)

Just click on the "All States" drop-down menu and pick your favorite state and county (if available) and spend some time with the maps. They don't have all the features genealogists would want by any means, but they have a lot.


Harold Henderson, "Kosciusko County and Many Other Maps On Line," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

STOP Creating Former Ancestors!

If there were a single portal through which every beginning genealogist had to pass, I would plaster Dick Eastman's recent post, "Barking Up the Wrong Tree," all over its walls in a jumbo-size font.

Eastman's story is good because it's so familiar. We've all done it, and more people are doing it every day (encouraged no doubt by Ancestry.com's ignorant advertising): assume that if the name's the same, the person's the same -- and then when we later find the mistake, have to remove not only the wrong person but all the work we did on that wrong person! He asks readers, "Have you independently verified every 'fact' you have discovered? By 'independently,' I mean that you should always find a contemporary record that agrees with the first record you found."

I would add the suggestion that knowing and following the five-part Genealogical Proof Standard is a good way to avoid getting into this fix:

• a reasonably exhaustive search;
• complete and accurate source citations;
• analysis and correlation of the collected information;
• resolution of any conflicting evidence; and
• a soundly reasoned, coherently written conclusion. 

The last point is just as important as the others. The end point is not entering your ancestors in a database. Will you remember the process of evidence and reasoning that got them there? Tomorrow? In a year? In a decade? What about your great-grandchildren? Writing up the conclusion is important even if you plan never to publish. Sometimes doing so is enough to uncover contradictions and uncertainties and things we forgot to look for.



Dick Eastman, "Barking up the Wrong Tree,"Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter, 14 July 2012, http://blog.eogn.com/eastmans_online_genealogy/2012/07/barking-up-the-wrong-tree.html



Harold Henderson, "STOP Creating Former Ancestors!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday came on a Friday this week

I tend to assume that everybody reads Dick Eastman, and as a result I often forget to do so. That would be a mistake. There's plenty more to be said about internet searching, but what he relays from a recent FamilySearch conference call is plenty thought-provoking in itself.

This is one of the messages Elizabeth Shown Mills has been preaching for a while, and there are way plenty of genealogists (or as Craig Scott would have it, "people doing genealogy") who have not absorbed it yet.

Genealogy TV in parts of the Midwest

Dick Eastman says "Legend Seekers" is a good show -- TV watchers in much of southern and central Illinois, and Indianapolis and Bloomington, Indiana, will get to see for themselves as early as tonight.

Merry Christmas and Genealogy Reference To You

This may be superfluous if y'all already read Dick Eastman's newsy blog/newsletter. Jack Simpson, the curator of local family history at the Newberry Library, has started a blog to update his recently published book Basics of Genealogy Reference: A Librarian's Guide. As I blogged in October, it's aimed at librarians but quite possibly of interest to serious genealogists as well.

Not just remembering the respectable

Dick Eastman blogs about northwestern Ohio genealogist Jana Sloan Broglin's new books but doesn't link to them. Parts 1 and 2 of Hookers, Crooks, and Kooks are available here.

Broglin, CG, is at least a triple threat: in addition to extracting this, um, out-of-the-way information from the 1880 US Census, she's an engaging lecturer, and now as "Aunt Merle" she's a blogger. (Aunt Merle was the real-life inspiration for Broglin's new books, as she was the madame of a house in Toledo.)

I've always thought genealogy is at its best when it finds the people who have been most thoroughly forgotten by respectable, successful society. The carefully pruned family trees and selective autobiographies in the Victorian-era county histories are useful and easy to find, but they aren't the whole story.

Welcome

My goal here is to post regularly about genealogy news and research and resources involving Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and their neighbor and feeder states. That's more or less the region also known as the Midwest; the Old Northwest; Region V; everything between St. Louis and Pittsburgh, Mackinac and Cincinnati; or "pretty much any place you can drive to from my house in 5 or 6 hours."

If you need to be convinced that this is fascinating stuff, or if you want to read long essays about what I did today, you're in the wrong place. If you're looking for national and international news, Dick Eastman's newsletter is indispensable.

But if you want to learn and comment along with me about which counties to hope your ancestors lived and died in... what major libraries and repositories are offering... what recent articles, books, or blog posts touch on our region... then please stay tuned!