Fall/Winter 2010 Hoosier Genealogist: Connections

There's a lot to like in the new issue of The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections from the state historical society.

There's history in Richard M. Lytle's timely "Desperate Times: Hammond, Indiana, Endures the Great Depression."

There's hard-core genealogy data in another installment of Timothy Mohon's "Hoosier Baptists" and their records.

There's a repository review on the state library's History Reference Room.

There's a reflection on the personal meaning of the classic Midwestern matchup between border Southerners on one hand and Yankees and New Englanders on the other -- Randy K. Mills's "'Not Like Your Father's People.'"

There's an institutional and records context for finding the hardest-to-find people in Rachel Popma's study of the Blackford County Asylum for the Poor, "Finding Destitute Ancestors."

And, of course, there are three classic family chronicles:

"Along the Wabash: Dora Family History Leads Back to Indiana's Earliest Recorded European Settlers," in which Rob Dora works the French records from the 1700s.

"Pioneer Politician: John Kennedy Graham, Clark and Floyd Counties 1805-1841," by Geneil Breeze.

"Maria's Journey: From the Mexican Revolution to Indiana's Steel Mills," by Ramon Arredondo and Trisha (Hull) Arredondo.

Indentures from southern Indiana

Longer ago than I care to admit, Cyndi's List called my attention to the Floyd County, Indiana, Genealogy Trails web site. Like the far-southern-Indiana county's GenWeb site, it has many useful tidbits produced by volunteers, but of one item they have a goodly amount of a kind of record I don't see much of: indentures from the mid- and late 1800s in Floyd and neighboring Harrison counties, many for apprenticeships. Clearly these are legal documents and they seem to be faithfully transcribed, but the site doesn't identify either the transcriber(s) or the location(s) of the original documents.

The Cemetery Detective

Shirley Wolf has rediscovered 10 African-American cemeteries in southern Indiana's Floyd County, and she may be on to 10 more, according to a long feature story by Katya Cengel in the Sunday Courier-Journal newspaper published across the river in Louisville. The story, perhaps inevitably, leads with Wolf's controversial use of dowsing to find burials, but farther down we get a taste of her genealogical technique:

To locate the unmarked cemeteries, she went through the county's death records, from the early 1900s to the 1960s. When she found an unfamiliar burial site, she would check if the person was African American, and if he or she was, Wolf would check to see if the person owned land. If he or she did, Wolf would visit the property to see what she could find, asking those in the area if anyone knew about a cemetery. ... A picture framer of German, French and Swiss descent [and a past president of the Southern Indiana Genealogical Society], Wolf is focusing on African-American cemeteries because she wants people to know that, despite the ravages of slavery, "there are things that can be found."