They were never just farmers

The GenealogyGals don't post every day, but the posts are worth waiting for. My eye was caught by this story from a grandfather's grandfather:

In the winter time [probably 1853-1860] there was absolutely no work for young men around Wakeman, [Huron County, Ohio] just a case of waiting for spring planting. Once the fall crops had been harvested, there’d be several months that they had to wait without much to do. One year, my grandfather saw an ad in the Cincinnati Enquirer asking for woodcutters along the Mississippi to prepare wood for the steam boats. ...

If you can resist clicking to read the whole thing, you're stronger than me.

Tales from the Firelands

You don't see many blogs with footnotes, but Dave Barton's four-month-old Firelands History Blog is the better for them. He's posting about once a week and documenting the history of what is now mainly Huron and Erie counties in north central Ohio, which were set aside for those whose towns were burned during the American Revolution. (Justice was significantly delayed in this case, as the lands didn't begin to settle until after the War of 1812.) Most of the settlers were from New England.

"With this blog," writes Barton, "I intend to tell the stories those who settled in the Firelands; people like Platt and Sally Benedict, who founded Norwalk, Ohio; Samuel Preston, who founded the Reflector, Norwalk’s present-day newspaper; his daughter Lucy, who persuaded a ship captain named Frederick Wickham to marry her, leave the sea and become a newspaperman with her father; Henry Buckingham, a failed businessman who was a conductor on the Underground Railroad; and many more."

Birth and Death in Willard, Ohio

A tip o' the hat to the October 15 issue of NEHGS eNews for highlighting the Willard Memorial Libary's online databases of birth and death announcements. (Willard's not a place you're likely to visit by accident. It's a small railroad town in Huron County, Ohio, south of Norwalk -- about halfway between the east-west arteries of the Ohio Turnpike on the north and the near-interstate-quality US 30 to the south.)

Each database contains just over 10,000 entries from the local newspaper, the Willard Times-Junction. My quick and possibly superficial check didn't find any entries prior to 1950. Volunteers continue to add to the system, but it's not clear whether they're keeping up with the present or moving back into the past, or both. Thanks to them in either case.

On my way out I noticed the library's front page: "Willard Memorial Library SYSTEM LIBRARIES CUT HOURS DUE TO SECOND HALF BUDGET REDUCTION." Something similar has happened at my local library in Indiana. Librarians may not be in a good position to speak out, but as genealogists we should let our elected officials know that libraries are a public service that should not be crippled by short-sighted budget freezes and tax cuts.