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.

And You Thought You Knew the GenWeb Archives!

I had no idea until a friend forwarded an email that the GenWeb Archives includes "Penny Postcards," old postcards organized by state and county. They have cards from everywhere, and the Midwest holdings are ample.

It would appear that there are at least two kinds of postcards represented: the carefully airbrushed and tinted ones, and the (more individual and less overtly boosterish?) black-and-white images. It's these less boosterish ones that can almost stop my heart -- it really is like a Jack Finney story, a moment frozen in time, like this one from Three Oaks, Berrien County, Michigan.

You may find these little images at the end of a quest, but it could also be the beginning -- since it's often not clear just when they were taken, but at a guess I'd say most of them are around a century old.

Porter County, Indiana Genweb's new look

In northwest Indiana, Porter County GenWeb has a new address and searchable obituary transcriptions (with full citations available), biography transcriptions (so far from the 1882 and 1894 mug books mostly), and Pearl Stoner Johnston's abstracts of wills and probates 1839-1880. Steve Shook is the coordinator. More is promised, including plat maps.

What's old in Hamilton County, Illinois

Southern Illinois' Hamilton County (county seat McLeansboro) has a historical society whose website is new on Cyndi's List, including a listing of the society's next meeting (unfortunately in March), the location and hours of its museum and genealogical library, and its publications -- including oral histories taken in 1978 and recently transferred to CDs and made available for sale.

If you have folks in this part of the world, Linkpendium has a good set of links and the Hamilton County GenWeb site has some unusual transcriptions including state censuses of 1855 and 1865.

So it comes as rather a disappointment that out of the 36,000 or so people in my genealogy database, including a bunch of southern Illinoisans, no one (yet!) has a connection there.