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.]

thanks...

...to those who voted MMH into the good company of Family Tree Magazine's top 40 genealogy blogs. Others in the "regional & local" category hail from Sandusky and California. Check out the whole list. I've already found some I should be reading -- and quoting!

St. Louis index at the Missouri History Museum

Strictly speaking, St. Louis is out of my area, but our ancestors didn't know that. Hat tip to Diane Haddad, whose Genealogy Insider blog for Family Tree Magazine calls attention to the Missouri History Museum's Genealogy and Local History Index. The index is on line, the things indexed -- mostly pertaining to St. Louis residents and businesses -- are not, but you can request photocopies. I found a reference to a potential Gedney cousin who appeared in a scrapbook on "Missourians in the European War" (that is, World War I), an eleven-volume set, the kind of thing that often doesn't get indexed.