"The Republic for Which It Stands"

All four of my grandparents were born in the "Gilded Age," between 1874 and 1887, and genealogy sometimes makes me more at home in the 19th century than the 21st. Now that I am almost one-quarter through Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, I can say it has enhanced my understanding of that time period more than any other single book.

Yes, this same guy also produced The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. IMO, any normal person would happily rest on the laurels of either work.

This Is the Archive of Stories That Never End...

The National Archives at Chicago is a very serious repository -- no bags, no binders, no pencils, and for my money the toughest citations. It's easy to forget that it also contains enough raw story material to get a continent full of blocked novelists writing again.

Of course, that's not usually the reason we genealogists visit there. We've got specific dead people to find, not stories, but the stories often weasel their way into our negative findings. In Record Group 110, "Records of the Provost Marshal General's Bureau (Civil War)" for Indiana, I briefly encountered a good Civil War soldier who went to town with his buddies, got drunk, and was placed on a train to somewhere other than where his unit was. Having laboriously managed to get back home, get some money, and return to camp, he learned that the unit had been mustered out and he was listed as a deserter. (No, I don't know how it came out!) Check out this list of their record groups.

At my first national conference in 2008, I recall some archivists brought in a dried mole skin from the main office, but they could have brought almost any piece of paper, really. Another wonderful setting for a story emerged from the pension file of a thrice-married Michigan woman (obtained from the national, not a branch). She was the widow of a bona fide Civil War soldier, and married second a man who worked on sailing ships in the summers and in the woods in the winters. He died under obscure circumstances on the lake in the late 1860s -- no records. Decades later when she sought a pension, the question arose whether he was really dead. In their fruitless investigation, pension bureau employees beat the bushes up and down the western shore of Lake Michigan, looking for a handful of footloose aging men who had once worked the lakes when you could just go down to the dock and sign on to work a voyage. This was a world that had already vanished irretrievably by 1900.

Most of us live within reasonable driving distance of a regional archive, if not the big one in DC. Don't cheat yourself. Spend some time there getting acquainted with the people and the records (and the citations!). Chances are you'll find both stories and resources you never dreamed of. Check the out on line first, have a specific quest in mind, and call first.



Harold Henderson, "This Is the Archive of Stories That Never End...," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Did your forebear make this trip in 1847?

Check out page 300 in the previously blogged Appletons' Railroad and Steamboat Companion, a summary of the five-day, 1500-mile trip from New York City to Chicago in the summer of 1847:

by boat from NYC to Albany...

by train from Albany to Buffalo (riding all night if you're in a hurry)...

and the rest of the way by "one of the large and elegant Upper Lake boats" ("ladies and gentlemen...with guns, fishing-tackle, harps, flutes, violins, and other music")...

stopping at Cleveland, Detroit, "Mackinaw," where you can try your luck at fishing "in water so clear that you can see a trout twenty feet from the surface"...

and then south down Lake Michigan to Chicago, population 16,000.

Total fare: $21.

Ohio Genealogy News on township records

Ohio Genealogy News isn't the big-name magazine of the Ohio Genealogical Society (that would be the Quarterly, of course), but it could stand comparison with most states' flagship publications. Lately it's been zeroing in on under-used record types with good nuts-and-bolts methodology articles. This month it's township records. If you're not an OGS member and can't afford to add another membership, check out a library copy. Contents include:

"Digging for Gold in Town and Township Records," by Tom Neel

"Township Records -- An Overlooked Treasure," by Diane V. Gagel

"History of Townships in Ohio"

Next April is the OGS's 50th anniversary conference in Huron (Erie County), with Ohio-born Ian Frazier (author of the incomparable Families) as keynote speaker. This issue highlights north-central Ohio research options nearby, including the Firelands Historical Society, Sandusky Library and Archives Research Center, and Clarence S. Metcalf Great Lakes Maritime Research Library in Vermilion. I had no idea this last place existed, let alone that they have "over 125 linear feet of manuscript materials such as diaries, journals, and ships' logs," plus the full run of Inland Seas (quarterly journal of the Great Lakes Historical society) and bound copies of Marine Review 1884-1931. It's all about the history of Great Lakes vessels and shipping, so the genealogy relevance is mainly for those with a lake connection somewhere.

Dang. We drive through northern Ohio on a regular basis. It's going to be hard to make any time if I have to stop at a repository every few miles!

More Third Coast genealogy

In the April-June issue of NGS Newsmagazine, Debra Mieszala, CG, of Lake County, Illinois, describes records of the Coast Guard predecessor United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS), begun in the 1870s. If you have a research target involved, these records are a treat -- everything from logbooks to correspondence to "articles of engagement." And check out the list of articles for further study.

An obscure research beacon

This month's "Genealogy Gems" from the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne (not yet archived here) includes a note by Delia Cothrun Bourne about NARA publication M1373, "Registers of Lighthouse Keepers, 1845-1912," nineteen rolls of microfilm complete with maps and indexes. The Great Lakes have two of the six rolls, 1845-1900 and 1901-1912.

Ten Thousand Ships in Milwaukee

Most folks take an interest in the vessels that carried their ancestors across the ocean, but how many of us know how much information there is on the boats that carried our people across the Great Lakes, from New York and Pennsylvania to Michigan or Wisconsin?

Right now I'm wishing I lived closer to Milwaukee (although at least I can get there entirely by train :-)). That's where the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society and the Milwaukee Public Library have consolidated the work of many Lakes aficionados into a Great Lakes Marine File that holds, among other things, records of more than 10,000 lake-going ships of all kinds from 1679 to 2008 and counting. Don't miss this chance to make our forebears' experiences real.