St. Louis index at the Missouri History Museum

Strictly speaking, St. Louis is out of my area, but our ancestors didn't know that. Hat tip to Diane Haddad, whose Genealogy Insider blog for Family Tree Magazine calls attention to the Missouri History Museum's Genealogy and Local History Index. The index is on line, the things indexed -- mostly pertaining to St. Louis residents and businesses -- are not, but you can request photocopies. I found a reference to a potential Gedney cousin who appeared in a scrapbook on "Missourians in the European War" (that is, World War I), an eleven-volume set, the kind of thing that often doesn't get indexed.

Tech tip

Allison writing at Genealogy Insider has some useful tips for genealogically searching Google Books. (That should be enough to ruin my plans for the rest of the day!)

Ohio, the 600-pound genealogy gorilla

There should be more liveblogging of genealogy gatherings. Diane Haddad at Genealogy Insider gives us a taste of this past weekend's Ohio Genealogical Society convention in Cincinnati.

You may have seen the maps of the US where states are sized according to population rather than land area, with California and Florida growing to monstrous size and the Rocky Mountain areas tiny slivers? Well, if you made a genealogy-society map of the Midwest, Ohio would be bigger than Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan combined -- a lot bigger. Haddad reports "about 600" on the scene in Cincinnati; the Indiana Genealogical Society meeting in Evansville earlier this month had a paid attendance of 90.

Another comparison might be with the Indiana Historical Society's August gathering, "Midwestern Roots," in Indianapolis. Time will tell.

Northeastern Ohio heritage online

Diane Haddad at Genealogy Insider mentions Ohio's Heritage Northeast as a favorite website, and I can see why.

OHN combines into a single searchable database archival collections from Cleveland State University (the hosting institution), Akron-Summit County Public Library, Cleveland Public Library (a genealogical force in its own right, home of the excellent Cleveland Necrology File), Oberlin College Archives, Rodman Public Library (in Alliance), Westlake Porter Public Library, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Shaker Heights Public Library, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, and the Syracuse (New York) Public Library. (The last two institutions aren't in northeast Ohio, but they share relevant material.)

You can choose which of the several dozen collections to search: they run from Akron Banknotes (locally printed money from the Civil War era) to Yesterday's Lakewood, and include Cleveland postcards and ethnic groups including Blacks, Polish Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, and Hungarian Americans. Most are collections of images but there is some text. Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to tell from the collection title what you're going to get, and I haven't found a way to simply browse a collection.

Be prepared to spend some time here. I don't have a lot of folks in NE Ohio, and let's just say it's taken me quite a while to write this post!