Now up to eleven mostly Midwestern indexes and finding aids

In addition to the nine links posted last year, two additional research aids are available on my web site:

Wisconsin Small City Directories 1903-1936 -- four rolls of microfilm published by City Directories of the United States, containing 29 directories for various years for more than 24 different towns and 7 different counties -- but labeled neither on the boxes nor at the beginning of the films themselves!

In order to make this resource useable I have spooled through the four films and listed title and publisher (when available) and date, and posted the lists and indexed them. This Wisconsin listing joins similar listings for Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. I have included CDUS's numbers as well as the numbers assigned to them at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, where I consulted them.

Few of these towns were able to support annual or even biennial directories, but it's a good bet that diligent researchers who visit local libraries and archives will find directories for more years than were microfilmed here. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries each of these towns had their own confident local business community.

Indiana private laws relating to La Porte County 1843-1847 and 1850, abstracted from Google Books. This is an experiment in making this relatively obscure resource more available. These are drawn from "session law" books describing the laws passed relating to particular people and organizations in each legislative session. Are your people mentioned?



Harold Henderson, "Now up to eleven mostly Midwestern indexes and finding aids," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 April 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Loyal Acorn: A Day in the Life

Curiosity killed the cat, but it only slows down the genealogist. Our first wood-burning stove (1974) was a quasi-antique with the quaint name "Umpire Estate," I presumed some company's attempt to sound like the nickname for New York. The other day I was checking transcribed court cases for a township in La Porte County, Indiana. In 1882, a man was being sued for unpaid bills; he had purchased two stoves, one called "Loyal Acorn."

I went right down that rabbit hole and searched on "loyal acorn" and stove. Up came an informative ad. And the excursion was actually relevant, because the printed ad revealed that I had mis-transcribed the surname of a company owner: it was Sard, not Lord.

But one mystery always leads to another: for some reason, Google thinks that the magazine containing this advertisement was volume 11 of Sanitary and Heating Age. In fact, as I paged back, it was the 29 March 1879 issue -- volume 11, yes, but of The Metal Worker: A Weekly Journal of the Stove, Tin, Plumbing, and House Furnishing Trades. Just one more reason to triple-check what we're citing.




"The 'Acorn' Line of Wood Cook Stoves," advertisement for Rathbone, Sard & Company, The Metal Worker: A Weekly Journal of the Stove, Tin, Plumbing, and House Furnishing Trades vol. 11 [number illegible], Sat. 29 March 1879, p. 5; digital image, Google Books (http://www.books.google.com : accessed 16 February 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Loyal Acorn: A Day in the Life," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Local Laws in Indiana on line, a sampling

We think of laws as general and impersonal, but legislatures also pass "private" or "local" laws directed to individuals or localities -- sometimes fairly routine, sometimes to redress injustices. These private laws were more common in earlier days and in Indiana are preserved in books published for each session of the General Assembly. Some are on line, some not -- but in either case the titling and cataloging are irregular. Many libraries catalog them as serials. Since the legislature began meeting in December and carried over into the next year, dating can be an issue. GoogleBooks makes its online copies rather hard to find. I have located six years there, 1843-1847 and 1850.

La Porte County, Indiana, is mentioned 30 times in these six books, an average of five items per year. They included:

* a few divorces,

* a few cases of aliens who owned and sold land,

* several incorporations of local institutions and businesses, usually naming the directors,

* some road authorizations with names of commissioners and directions (“on as straight a line as the nature of the ground will admit of”), and

* some routine, or just plain weird. I'm still scratching my head over the county commissioners' being authorized "to make John Johnson, of said county, the same allowance for the arrest of a horse thief, calling himself John Johnson, as they might have made if said horse thief had been convicted of said crime.”

Full details and access instructions if you get stuck are over at Midwest Roots.

In addition to looking for particular people, these books can be used as a kind of on-the-scene history, a bit like the "annuals" that encyclopedias used to publish. Names of businesses and institutions changed over time, and often the hardest part of researching people connected with them is figuring out what they were called at the time. So it may be helpful to know that in 1846 the legislature amended the charter of La Porte University so that its medical school would be known as Indiana Medical College. Those institutions are long gone but they were significant in early Midwest medical education.

Local histories tend to focus on those enterprises and individuals that succeeded and stuck around; the lawmakers didn't know the future, so this is a place to look for a "clay turnpike company," plank roads, and off-brand railroads that may have never run a train. History is often written by the winners; genealogy is written by everybody.


ADDED TUESDAY MORNING 31 July:
Two useful sets of information from this source in Indiana have been extracted, indexed, and published:

Malinda E. E. Newhard, Name Changes Granted by the Indiana General Assembly Prior to 1852 (Harlan, IN: author, 1981)

Malinda E. E. Newhard, Divorces Granted by the Indiana General Assembly Prior to 1852 (Harlan, IN: author, 1981). Note that in some cases the General Assembly actually granted the divorce, and in others it authorized the filing of a court case locally.

Newhard cited General Laws 1817-1851, Local Laws 1835-1851, and Special Laws 1818, 1824, and 1831.

Plank road scrip illustration from Sellitstore (http://sellitstore.ecrater.com/p/9628689/michigan-city-union-plank-road# : accessed 28 July 2012), where the bill once said to be worth $5 was for sale for $125.

Harold Henderson, "Local Laws in Indiana on line, a sampling," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Monday: finding out the law

Genealogists often need to know the law in ways that relatively few lawyers do. Often a relevant question is more specific in time and circumstance -- not so much at what age you could get married legally, but at what age could you get married in 1894, but only with parental consent?

When I needed to know that for Indiana, I turned to Google Books and triangulated. I found the complete revised statutes of the state for 1881 and again for 1901. In both cases women under 18 and men under 21 had to have parental consent. (I'm reasonably sure -- but not positive! -- that the legislature didn't change the law in the intervening 20 years and then change it back. This is a chronic legal research problem for me, since I'm rarely in a place where I have the time and disposition to check each year's record of legislative enactments.)

Since I was dealing with a possible shotgun marriage, it was also interesting to learn that if a couple married prior to the birth of a child, that would block any charge of bastardy. That was based on a couple of case citations, which did not include years. More research for another day, if needed...

But what I started out to say was, wouldn't it be nice to have a source-cited table of marriageableness for every state, every year?

Data mining past publications

Marian Pierre-Louis shared this interesting link from the Boston Globe via Facebook about a new study published in Science and a new tool Google has made publicly available. The gist:

Google is publicly launching the tool, Google Books Ngram Viewer, to allow scholars or the simply curious to ask questions, such as when references to “The Great War,’’ which peaked between 1915 and 1941, were replaced by “World War I.’’ The tool allows people to look up words or phrases that range from one to five words, and see their occurrences over time — the frequency that a word is mentioned in a given year divided by the total number of words written that year.

I'm sure we can learn a lot from this. And like all tools going back to the sharp stick, it can be misused as well. Counting things is never the whole story. As noted in the article, the way in which words are used may mean more than their frequency. And sometimes the revealing fact lies in what things that are not mentioned, what books were never published, or words whose meaning has subtly shifted over time.

Are You Looking for a 1950s Motorcycle Geek?

ResearchBuzz reports that Google Book Search has just the research tool you need to look for a mid-twentieth-century motorcycle enthusiast or dealer, or anybody who might get his or her name in the magazine known first as American Motorcycling (January 1955 to June 1970), then as AMA News (July 1970 to August 1977), and finally as American Motorcyclist (September 1977 to December 2007) -- published from central Ohio by the American Motorcycle (now Motorcyclist) Association.

The first issue on the site is called volume 9, number 1, and the issues for 1980 and 1981 are missing, so perhaps there is more to come. Also I can confirm ResearchBuzz's statement that the search across all issues is wonky. Search within a given issue seems OK. Researchers, let's ride.

A Google Books index by state

The ever-observant Jeanne Bloom, CG, points out Rainy Day Research's index to Google Book Search -- genealogically relevant books (many mug books from the late 1800s) available in full text, organized by state. (RDR also has a line in California newspapers.) I observe 52 titles for Illinois, 27 Indiana, 69 Michigan, 61 Ohio, and 18 Wisconsin -- and not just the usual suspects. This resource will only get better as Google draws more books into its maw.

Chicago, Its History and Builders

So far I haven't found a web site that has digital images of all five volumes of Chicago: Its History and Its Builders, A Century of Marvelous Growth (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1912). But if you visit both Google Book Search and Illinois Harvest, between them you can view the whole thing.

A search on the title in quotes at Google Book Search produces three hits. At least on my machine, the top one is volume 5, the second one is volume 4, and the third hit is volume 1. Click on the title page image to make sure what you've got.

Illinois Harvest has four of the five volumes at the following URLs:
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 5

Since Volume 4 and 5 have the biographies, this could make a difference.

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!)