Elkhart County, Indiana

Genealogists love free stuff, and if you have research targets in north central Indiana, resources have been kindly provided by your colleagues that you may not know about, although it is not technically news: an on-line index of microfilmed loose probate papers (and some related court cases) known by the acronym CRIMP.

You can read the full story there; the index was compiled by Ned and Bea Parcell. You can tell it was done by genealogists, because in addition to the numbers needed to access the records, they included a sprinkling of other names involved on each set of probate papers, so that readers of the index can get a notion of whether these are indeed the people they're looking for.

The index then allows you to visit the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or visit a local Family History Center and order the appropriate microfilm (using a conversion table to get the right number, available on the above site). Or you can visit the Elkhart County Historical Society library located in the county historical museum in the former Bristol High School, where the films are available for viewing. It's also possible to download your selected images onto a thumb drive -- all at no charge. The amount of embedded effort involved in making one local record set accessible is hard to calculate, or appreciate. And one of the best ways to repay is to help add more records to the store.

Online resources at both ends of Indiana

In northern Indiana:

In Elkhart County, the Wakarusa Public Library Historical Room has a few photographs, maps, books, and articles on line, plus a goodly number of obituaries including full transcribed text from local newspapers. (I can't tell how many are indexed, but just two of them have birthdates before 1800.) The other items are browseable as well as searchable, the obituaries are only searchable. We all buzz right over to the obituaries, but if you have research targets there don't forget to check out the three plat maps of land ownership in Olive Township (the east half of congressional township 36 North range 4 East of the 2nd principal meridian) for 1874, 1892, and 1915.

Just a few miles south of Wakarusa near the Kosciusko county line, the Nappanee Public Library’s Evelyn Lehman Culp Heritage Center Collection has a similarly searchable set of obituaries.

In southern Indiana:

In Washington County (northwest of Louisville KY), Salem's Crown Hill Cemetery was founded in 1824. The city of Salem has its history and records on line, complete with a location map within the cemetery. (Two burials from 1824 are recorded.) This is the way on line cemeteries should be. The history refers to a cholera epidemic in 1833, and you can confirm that by searching for burials by date: six in 1832, 47 in 1833, eight in 1834. The site also links to the Washington County Historical Society's John Hay Center, with a genealogical library. (Hay was born here and is best known for being Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary.)

(Another hat tip to Valerie Beaudrault of the New England Historic Genealogical Society's eNews for spotting the above resources.)

Also in virtual southern Indiana, right on the Ohio River, the Vanderburgh County genweb site has a new look and includes links to the Willard Library in Evansville and to the famous Browning obituary collection.

Know where you're going, and where they went

"I waited 7 hours in Chicago for a 15 minute flight. Had I known South Bend was so close to Chicago I could have easily taken a bus and arrived in plenty of time to relax and prepare for the seminar the following morning."

Geoff Rasmussen, posting at the genealogy database program Legacy's blog, makes the best of his 21st-century misadventures en route to a presentation at the Elkhart County (Indiana) Genealogical Society, and turns them into a pertinent reminder that genealogy without geography can result in delays of decades, not hours. Besides, you've gotta love a genealogy program with a geographical anachronism alert: it tells you when you've typed in the name of a county that didn't exist yet in that year!