Methodology Monday with upstate New York in Allen County Public Library

Plenty of Midwesterners came from, or through, New York -- and in doing so created multiple migraines for their descendants who have to cope with a gigantic state that has few statewide record sets for the 19th century (always excepting those wonderful state censuses).

John Beatty, writing in the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's monthly e-zine "Genealogy Gems" for November 30, offers an introduction to using the 185-roll microfilm collection of New York State DAR transcribed records, largely of cemeteries, vital records, and Bible records. (If the direct link doesn't work, start here. This is the genealogy center's microtext catalog, for which their elegant new AquaBrowser catalog is NOT a substitute!) Back issues through 2009 and a free electronic subscription form are also available here.

You do want to read this article before jumping in, as the arrangement and indexing is not quite state of the art. But sooner or later, you're going to have to crack a New York family. Why not now?

Women Teachers on the Frontier

Sometimes the problem is not so much locating a source, but knowing that such a source even exists in the first place! My son turned up Polly Welts Kaufman's Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) in connection with his history project, but it's also an interesting kind of genealogy source. I didn't find it on Google Books or Internet Archive, but hard copies are available at reasonable prices on AbeBooks. And Worldcat shows many copies in Midwestern libraries, both public and college.

The book is not some simplified narrative, it's a publication directly derived from relatively little-known original sources, in this case records of the National Popular Education Board of the 1850s, residing largely in the Connecticut Historical Society -- diaries and letters of women teachers who seized the opportunity to go on their own to the frontier, earn a living, and help civilize and bring Protestantism to it.

Don't expect to find your New England or New York ancestress here (although that is possible). Do expect to find outsider accounts of the Midwestern frontier, especially in Indiana and Illinois -- and do also expect take into account their inevitable bias toward "uplift" and a certain brand of religion.

A similar source that I had already heard of and looked into are the letters from men in the American Home Missionary Society. For more information on them, you can start where I did, with John Beatty's article in the September 2007 issue of the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's e-zine "Genealogy Gems."

Detroit social history for your genealogy

The Allen County Public Library's free e-zine "Genealogy Gems" comes to my mailbox on the last day of every month. Most welcome in this month's issue was John D. Beatty's explanation of why the genealogy department carries a lot of social history. In writing up his family, he used

Richard J. Oestreicher’s book, Solidarity and
Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit,
1875-1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), and Olivier
Zunz’s The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial
Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880-1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), both offered statistics on the
numbers of immigrants in Detroit, placing immigration in the context
of other Midwestern cities. Oestreicher also compared the wages of
skilled laborers by occupation versus unskilled laborers. No, my
immigrant ancestors were not mentioned by name in these books, but I
gained a better understanding of the ethnic German east-side
neighborhood where they resided.

I should look into these sources for my grandmother's brother's family and in-laws who grew up in Detroit.

More ways to get to Fort Wayne

The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library has its own blog and a Facebook page, as well as an e-newsletter "Genealogy Gems" previously noted here. Blog and Facebook offer links to three important resources at the library: the main catalog, the separate microtext catalog, and the online databases. The socially inclined can become fans.

The Great White Whale and March Madness

In some ways, the semi-legendary State Historical Society of Wisconsin's Draper Manuscript
Collection is the Great White Whale of mid-continent genealogy -- too big to spear, too scary even to approach. Writing in the Allen County Public Library's e-newsletter "Genealogy Gems" for 30 November, Steven W. Myers suggests several approaches available at the library, including Josephine Harper's "Guide to the Draper Manuscripts" (call number 016.978 H23g) "In addition to detailed descriptions of each manuscript volume's contents and a general index," he writes, "useful appendices include an index to Revolutionary War pension applicants, an index to the names of authors, cartographers, correspondents and interviewees, and an extensive inventory of maps present in the collection." Next visit I promise to give this a shot.

Next visit could be in March: Melissa Shimkus and Delia Bourne list seven classes in the first seven days of the month. Detailed descriptions and registration information will be available at Genealogy Special Programs, but in the meantime topics look like beginning-to-intermediate level topics, including Southern lore, Flickr, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and evaluating published family histories.

Where some of your midwesterners went

Delia Cothrun Bourne, writing in "Genealogy Gems" #56 (31 October 2008) from Indiana's Allen County Public Library, points us to an eight-volume resource I had never heard of: News of the Plains and Rockies, 1803-1865: Original Narratives of Overland Travel and Adventure Selected from the Wagner-Camp and Becker Bibliography of Western Americana, compiled and annotated by David A. White (978 N474), with 168 original narratives and historians' commentary, arranged topically, with topics including "early explorers, fur hunters, Santa Fe adventurers, settlers, missionaries, Mormons, Indian agents and captives, warriors,
scientists, artists, gold seekers, railroad forerunners, and mailmen."

This isn't in most libraries, according to Worldcat (if you're closer to Chicago, check it out; it is in the Newberry). Ideally these volumes would be useful for general background, or for filling in your research target's likely experiences in the absence of his or her own first-person story. (That's why it's going on my list for my next visit.) But if you're in search of a particular name or names, it is on Google Book Search, in snippet view only.

And apparently it's not the last word. Allen County also has Plains & Rockies, 1800-1865 : one hundred twenty proposed additions to the Wagner-Camp and Becker bibliography of travel and adventure in the American West : with 33 selected reprints. Hi ho, researchers away!

Annals of Cleveland

The Allen County (Indiana) Public Library's monthly email newsletter, "Genealogy Gems" (back issues here), can be counted on for at least one resource find per issue. In July (yes, I am behind, thank you for asking) we find the Annals of Cleveland, a WPA-era indexing of early city newspapers and court cases as "Cleveland Newspaper Digest" 1818-76 and the "Cleveland Court Record Series" 1837-77. They're available in both microfiche and bound volumes, although the print version of the newspaper digest stops in 1858. An online taste is available here.

Pamphlets -- not ephemeral any more

In the end-of-May issue of Allen County Public Library's "Genealogy Gems" email newsletter (not yet on line here, but earlier issues are), Cynthia Theusch describes the library's microfiche collection of Pamplets in American History -- more than 17,000 of them, fortunately with a set of printed descriptive indexes, one for each of the five volumes.

Chances are this collection will serve you as context for family history rather than an original source, but you never know. The five volumes as Theusch describes them are thematically organized, and cover
(1) "Revolutionary War, Revolutionary War biography, biography, women, and Indians";
(2) "civil liberties, labor, and tariffs and free trade";
(3) "cooperative societies, finance, the Mexican War, socialism, and the War of 1812";
(4) "Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism and the Spanish-American War"; and
(5) "Mormons and Mormonism, the Civil War, and the European War, 1914-1918."

After visiting this library regularly for almost ten years, I'm still being surprised by what it has.

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.