Three Hours from Fort Wayne

A generic warning notice to all readers of this blog for the next 10 1/2 months. On top of my normal partiality towards the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center in Fort Wayne, I will be helping out with publicity for the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference to be held there 21-24 August 2013.

So I'm not entirely disinterested (if I ever was) when I take note of good points about ACPLGC . . . or its location. Check out Fort Wayne. It's in the upper-right-hand corner of Indiana. Within a fast three-hour drive are Columbus, Toledo, Detroit, Lansing, Kalamazoo, and Indianapolis. In the unlikely event that ACPLGC has no research attraction for you before, after, or during FGS, you will be positioned within driving distance of the premier repositories of three states.

Make that six states if you can keep the pedal to the metal. Just down the road a little farther are Cleveland, Cincinnati, Louisville, Springfield, Chicago, and Madison, home of the Wisconsin State Historical Society. As they sometimes say in real estate, this place is "convenient to everything."

Of course, if you don't like crowds or conferences, you could visit at some other time. (Oh. Was I not supposed to say that?)


"Regional Map," Visit Fort Wayne Indiana (http://www.visitfortwayne.com/map-room/regional-map : accessed 2 October 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Three Hours from Fort Wayne," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Forgotten French of the Midwest

 The time is 1823. The place is Fort Wayne. Indiana has been a state for seven years. The dismayed writer is William H. Keating, who has just arrived from the east:

Not being previously aware of the diversity in the character of the inhabitants, the sudden change from an American to a French population, has a surprising, and to say the last, an unpleasant effect; for the first twenty-four hours, the traveller fancies himself in a real Babel. . . . The business of a town of this kind differs so materially from that carried on in our cities, that it is almost impossible to fancy ourselves still within the same territorial limits.

This quote leads off Yale historian Jay Gitlin's book The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders and American Expansion. Whether he liked it or not, Keating knew what we have systematically forgotten.

Not only was French spoken frequently "in an enormous region stretching from Detroit to St. Louis to New Orleans," as Gitlin explains, the story of this Francophone Midwest "has never found a place in American history textbooks for three related reasons: the dramatis personae have never been correctly identified; the geographical setting of the story lies upon a north-south axis and therefore lies counter to the traditional east-west presentation of U.S. history; and the story has been dismissed as being irrelevant to the general themes of American history." {2}

Gitlin is out to fix this. His story centers on the powerful and prosperous Chouteau family (sometimes called a dynasty) of St. Louis and westward, who do not fit the cheerful-lazy-voyageur stereotype propagated by early US historians. These French came from many places, not just Canada; they were cosmopolitan; and they were deeply involved in commerce and trade. This was an urban frontier before it was a farmers' frontier. From the start it was "urban, cosmopolitan, connected, and diverse." {188} Gitlin concludes that the French have remained invisible, not because they were uninvolved in nation-building, but "in part because their story demands that we accept a frontier past that transcends our old dichotomies of heroes and villains, settlers and Indians." {190}

This book will change your idea of the Midwest, and its smooth readable style will leave you wanting more.

H-Net also has an interesting review of a related book, Claiborne A. Skinner's The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes.



Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

Claiborne A. Skinner, The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).


Harold Henderson, "The Forgotten French of the Midwest," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day Four (Saturday September 1)

The South Carolina backcountry could be the US headquarters of brick walls, so it behooves dedicated researchers to pay attention when Elizabeth Shown Mills devotes an entire lecture to the region, as she did Saturday, the final morning of FGS 2012 in Birmingham. It doesn't matter whether you have, or ever expect to have, research targets there. To paraphrase an old song about a big city, "If you can solve it there, you can solve it anywhere." My only problem with the talk was that not everyone at the conference was there to hear it.

Squeezed in around the lecture I enjoyed a pleasant breakfast with fellow APG board members Joan Peake and Kimberly Powell, picked up a 75%-off book at the Genealogical.com booth, and got to the Birmingham airport before midday, leaving plenty of time to chat with the selection of early-departing genealogists in Concourse C. (Speaking of vendor booths, earlier in the conference I was pleased to meet up with a new and very promising hybrid that could be the answer to the riddle, "What do you get when you cross an antique dealer with a genealogist?" -- to be blogged about in the near future.)

By leaving midday Saturday, I missed another very interesting-looking talk about exceedingly obscure federal pension records by Kenneth W. Heger, on NARA Record Group 48 (Records of the Department of the Interior) including pension commissioners' reports on appeals and correspondence.

Thanks to all the volunteer workers who made this conference possible. I'm looking forward to next year's edition in the Midwestern research mecca of Fort Wayne, Indiana!


Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Four (Saturday September 1)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Fort Wayne and Chicago digitized newspapers

When you ask to "browse collections" on Fold3.com these days, you can choose among the records of seven wars and -- "other records."

The site's new focus on on military records has many upsides, but one downside is that researchers might forget that the former Footnote.com has marvelous collections of city directories -- and digitized newspapers. For researchers working the Midwest, Fold3 has both the Chicago Tribune (1849-1923) and seven titles from Fort Wayne:

Daily Gazette 1882-1898

Gazette 1899

Journal Gazette 1899-1923

News 1874-1917

Sentinel 1870-1923

Weekly Journal 1890-1899

Weekly Journal Gazette 1899-1914

Put 'em together and that's more than half a century.

Indiana Genealogist December 2010

The current issue of the Indiana Genealogist quarterly is the last one you'll see in print, unless you print it out from your computer, reports editor Rebecca E. Tomerlin of Valparaiso. Indiana Genealogical Society members can view this issue and later ones in PDF format.

The issue contains more than twenty items, including a number of good pictures of Indiana soldiers' graves and memorials in Tennessee, and much more. My eye was caught by two footnoted articles and a "lost" record retrieved:

Dawne Slater-Putt, "Establishing a Possible Identity of Ford Myers: a Fort Wayne Photo Subject," an especially good detective story if you've ever sighed over an orphaned photo in an antique shop.

Penelope Mathiesen, "Burgoon Church and the Burgoon Family in Monroe County, Indiana" -- the family donated land to the Baptist church but were not members; the children moved and married elsewhere but several returned for burial.

Marjorie Weiler-Powell's find of a complete family record of James and Grace (Cade) Davis in the Dearborn County Circuit Court records for 14 July 1829, under the heading, "Register of Free Persons of Color."

Check BOTH catalogs before going to Fort Wayne!

The Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's new "Aqua Browser" catalog has interesting features, but it has not closed an important gap. It covers the microform collection only slightly better than the previous catalog did (which was not at all). You will miss some great and unexpected research opportunities if you don't also check the previous microtext catalog, which is still available here. (To navigate, go to the handsome new Genealogy Center site, pull down the databases menu, choose "free databases," and click on the fifth item down.)

Just by way of example, the new catalog does not hint at the fact that the library holds many sets of Ohio counties' early tax records.

"Smart Catalog" coming to Fort Wayne

One of the Midwest's premier research destinations will roll out a new on-line catalog system this Thursday! See the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's video on their blog.

On first viewing of the video, I'm excited about having a visible search trail and alerts via RSS feeds. I'm hopeful that this new system will make it possible to unify the Genealogy Center's microtext catalog with the main catalog in searching -- and that it will make it easier to figure out the proper configuration of words for subject searches, especially geographical ones. And I hope that the ability to view books title by title as they appear on the physical shelves will be preserved.

More Midwestern city directories at Internet Archive

Besides Indianapolis, Internet Archive's best midwestern city directory holdings are in Fort Wayne, Indiana (overlapping the Footnote collection) and Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.

Once again, I didn't find a good way to get the results in order, but for Urbana-Champaign I found directories for 1878-9, 1883-4, 1885, 1890, 1893, 1895-6, 1898, 1898-9, 1900, 1902-3, 1906, 1908, 1910, 1916, 1918, 1919-20, 1921, 1922, 1925, 1927, 1935, 1936, 1937, 1938, and 1940. Most also cover outlying areas of Champaign County. They also have a 1916 directory for the University of Illinois, said to include all 35,000 people ever associated with it up to that time.

For Indiana's second largest city, Internet Archive has 1858-9, 1860, 1862, 1864-5, 1866-7 (Williams), 1867 (Bailey's gazetteer), 1868-9, 1870-1, 1873-4, 1875-6, 1876-7, 1877, 1882-3, 1883-4, 1885-6, 1888 (called "v. 11 pt. 2"), 1898, 1902, 1903, 1906, 1910, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1917, and 1919. Again, many cover more of Allen County.

In the less-ideal-but-still-useful category, IA has a scattering of other directories. In Michigan, there's Saginaw (1915). In Illinois, they have Chicago (so-called 1855 and 1856, which are actually 1855-6 and a May 1856 supplement), Shelbyville (1909), and Galena (1854). In Indiana you can check out Valparaiso (1893), Kokomo (1910-11), Lafayette (1909-10), and Michigan City (1909-10). I'm not personally acquainted with all these towns, but you can pretty much expect to find many more directory years for each one in the right physical library.

Online Directories at EveNDon

Thanks to a poster on rootsweb's Cook County, Illinois, mailing list, I have learned that the free and ad-free site EveNDon has images (not transcripts!) of city and county directories well beyond their Pittsburgh home base. (Also some other materials I haven't had time to check out.) They accept donations for this great service and offer fee-based lookups and copying services if you have needs in western Pennsylvania.

In our area they have the following directories on line:

ILLINOIS: statewide, Cass County, Christian County, Coles County, Shelbyville, Springfield, and Chicago (12 directories 1844-1900)

INDIANA: Fort Wayne (4 directories 1860-1917), Indianapolis (9 directories 1858-1896), Jay County

MICHIGAN: Detroit, Saginaw

OHIO: statewide, Cincinnati (29 directories 1819-1875), Cleveland

WISCONSIN: Grand Rapids, Milwaukee, Wood County

FYI if your Midwestern roots stretch back to Pittsburgh, they also have 41 Pittsburgh directories 1761-1951.

As a directory aficionado, I would add that if you're in pursuit of everything about a research target, you may need to resort to travel, hired research, or pay sites (such as Footnote.com) that can offer every-year coverage. Working people's residences and relationships and business ties change very often, and you could easily miss an all-important clue by skipping even one year of the relevant time period in a directory. This also applies to non-appearances; people randomly disappear and reappear sometimes.

Genealogy Gems (not a blog)

It's the email newsletter of the second biggest genealogy library in the country, the Genealogy Center in the spanking new Allen County Public Library in downtown Fort Wayne. Subscribe at their website; it's a quick read with useful information (including a new orientation video in Quicktime format) even if you can't physically visit this Midwestern genealogical mecca. The January 31 edition of "Genealogy Gems" has a couple of articles on a source type close to my heart -- directories.

The library's online presence is growing and pleasantly idiosyncratic: so far it offers three searchable Indiana statewide databases: Indiana artists, Indiana WWI deaths, and the mortality lists for the Indiana Farm Colony for the Feeble-Minded (AKA Muscatuck Colony, in Jennings County), 1924-1937.