The Back Door to Chicago

Most genealogy societies have been around long enough that they have a significant amount of history, including a written trail of published research results, queries, and transcriptions. Many local periodicals are not indexed. Many are indexed by surname only (making researchers of names like Smith or Jones apoplectic). Many are indexed one issue, or one year, at a time. And then you have to find those indexes.

Fortunately there is a trend to digitize these potential clue factories. Thanks to the Newberry Library and the Chicago Genealogical Society, the Chicago Genealogist now has volumes 1 through 39 (1969-2007) on line and searchable.

Anyone who might have Chicago people should check it out (and then you'll be happier, but as far behind on your day as I am!). But if you're looking for my piece on a Civil War letter from Samuel Lowe, son of Cook County's first sheriff, it's still too recent, but you can read it here.

And speaking of urban research, the front door is open in Pittsburgh, where Historic Pittsburgh has an impressive run of early directories. They are not fully covered in my usual go-to reference, United States On Line Historical Directories.



Harold Henderson, "The Back Door to Chicago," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Find your Midwesterners in Pittsburgh

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for pointing out a very interesting subset of genealogically valuable material within the historical gold mine that is Historic Pittsburgh: 125 city directories 1815-1945.

As city directory digitizations go, this is a wonderfully well designed site. Let me count the ways:

* it includes actual images of directory pages, as opposed to error-prone transcriptions.

* it offers a long run of consecutive years, which is required for good research, given that directories often missed people in any given year.

* it keeps pages in their actual sequence, rather than mechanically rearranging them in numerical "order," or even conflating different directories of the same year, as Footnote sometimes unfortunately does.

* it allows searches of ancillary matter such as addresses -- making it possible to find extra residents at a given address, even if the city was too large to have had a criss-cross directory organized by address. So this new format is far more than a mere convenience and travel-saver; it is a powerful research tool.

Right now I'm recalling the long afternoons I spent cranking microfilm following my wife's Boren ancestors in the Pittsburgh directories. They were hard-working but not well off, and they moved every year. Happy New Year, and use this fine resource in good health!