Genealogy resources for La Porte County, Indiana -- work in progress

Some of the northwest district Indiana county genealogists will be getting together today in La Porte, so I finally got serious about starting to put together a list of research resources for this medium-sized county. (You can either follow the link or go to midwestroots.net and click on "La Porte County Indiana" in the lower right-hand corner of the page.)

It's amazing what local genealogists have accomplished over the years. Except for the obituary indexes, where I got overwhelmed, I have tried to credit the authors/compilers when I could identify them.

The guide at present comes in four unequal-sized sections:

• Local Repositories and Societies (courthouse; libraries, archives, and museums; and on-line)

• Periodicals (two county newsletters and the two state periodicals)

• Indexes and Abstracts (70 and counting: for births, cemeteries, court records, deaths, divorces, funeral homes, land, marriages, military, naturalizations, newspapers, obituaries, periodicals, probates, professionals, and schools)

• Other Guides (the FamilySearch Wiki, the Indiana Genealogical Society's research page, the 1939 WPA Inventory of County Archives, and Linkpendium).

So far it's up to eight pages printed out, and as you can see I've stuck pretty much to indexes and the like, without yet starting to describe the actual records! It is a work in progress, so corrections and additions are welcome.

Harold Henderson, "Genealogy resources for La Porte County, Indiana -- work in progress," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 June 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Words from IGS Conference Day

Several admonitions are echoing in my mind from the Indiana Genealogical Society's day-long conference in Fort Wayne; other attendees' mileage may vary.

More than half of the 111 attendees also attended the business meeting, where we heard that our 76 volunteers had helped index 100% of Indiana's portion of the 1940 census in less than a month, far ahead of all neighboring states.

* Speaker Michael Hall, deputy chief genealogical officer of FamilySearch: “Every one of you should be writing in the FamilySearch Wiki [page about your county] about your libraries and resources,” thus helping draw genealogical tourism.

* Speaker Debra Mieszala, who works in the genealogical part of the process of identifying and returning remains of US soldiers long lost in action: The military now uses all three kinds of DNA -- Y-DNA, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal DNA, so relatives of missing soldiers may have new opportunities to provide reference samples. Of the 88,000 missing, 78,000 are from WWII.

* IGS president Michael Maben, who asked for volunteers for an advocacy committee and identified the State Archives (long relegated to an outdated warehouse) as a problem to be addressed: “We need to press our legislature to replace that facility."

* Mieszala again (part of an informative talk on finding the patent filings of inventive ancestors): The Great Lakes Regional Branch of NARA has a Facebook page, and we should "friend" it. Among the many great examples they post from their holdings, one is a patent infringement case.

Lots of good people and good laughs, all in a day's genealogy work . . . the April 2013 conference in Bloomington will feature Josh Taylor.


Harold Henderson, “Words from IGS Conference Day,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]