Drainage tile, anyone?

You never know when history is going to happen to you. I went outside the other morning and started clearing up a junk corner my wife and I had targeted for extinction. One item I picked up was a hollow burnt-orange cylinder with walls about half an inch thick -- a drainage tile.

It's very easy not to know what a huge role this piece of ceramic hardware played in the process of turning the often-swampy Midwestern prairie into productive farms connected by actual roads. Not only did it require the technology of creating standardized tile (these days I think they use continuous rolls of corrugated flexible black plastic), but the laws and organization necessary to create drainage districts, because the process won't work unless all the neighbors agree on it.

Tile was just as essential, but less charismatic or conspicuous than barbed wire, because once the fields are drained there's nothing to see. But eastern Illinois, western Indiana, and northwestern Ohio (just to name the parts I'm personally familiar with) would look entirely different if our ancestors and relatives hadn't participated in this process.

This process was not without controversy, then or now. A diverse prairie ecosystem was destroyed and replaced by what are now monocultures of corn and soybeans, dependent on annual doses of oil and chemicals to produce high yields. (In some places those once universally despised swamps are being re-created.)

Law professor James E. Herget wrote a thorough legal account in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society back in 1978; Englishman Hugh Prince's 1997 book Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes, at least part of which is available on a German offshoot of GoogleBooks, is more wide-ranging and even-handed.

How much have people used drainage district records in genealogy? Well, it's not unheard of. The Illinois State Archives holds some such records, and some relevant court records have been abstracted on US GenWeb for Stoddard County, Missouri. I'd love to hear more if anyone has gone beyond staring at an old piece of clay tile.



James E. Herget, "Taming the Environment: The Drainage District in Illinois," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society vol. 71, no. 2 (May 1978):107-118; digital image, Northern Illinois University Libraries Illinois Historical Digitization Project, "Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society," [1950-2006] (http://dig.lib.niu.edu/ISHS/ : accessed 4 June 2012).

Hugh Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Harold Henderson, "Drainage tile, anyone?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Slavery and emancipation resources in Illinois

Dave Bakke, a columnist for the State Journal-Register newspaper in Springfield, Illinois (home of this September's FGS meeting), has called attention to the state archives' database of servitude and emancipation records (1722-1863). The database (not new) includes information from a variety of sources in nine southern Illinois counties on 1301 men and 929 women, and instructions on how to obtain the original records there indexed.

The same column brings news that University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde is working on a book about slaves in the Land of Lincoln, and in the process helping upgrade the database. She'd like to see it include, for instance, material documenting the role of African-Americans in the lead mining district that includes Jo Daviess County in the state's far northwestern corner.

In her background reading, it sounds like VanderVelde is learning what genealogists should already know: that the late-19th and early-20th-century county histories are far from inclusive. "Many of the frontier histories have been whitewashed, creating an ‘amnesia’ about the slaves and indentured servants in free states.” While culling them for clues and additional sources, we would be ill advised to rely on them for information on anyone who wasn't prominent or conventional, or on the outline of the history they tell.

Advice for Illinois researchers

The other day I needed a Cook County death certificate from the 1940s. It appeared in the online database of Illinois death certificates 1916-1950, but not in the online database of death certificates in Cook County at the County Clerk's genealogy site.

I thought I had only three options: pay the Clerk $15 to look for it, pay the Illinois Department of Public Health $10 to look for it, or visit the Illinois State Archives in person.

I paid the clerk and waited 6 weeks, when I received a form letter to "valued customer" referring me to public health without explaining why they couldn't find a death certificate in their own jurisdiction. When I called to ask, I was referred to another number which rang 20 times without being answered.

The state Department of Public Health asserts (as if it were an ontological truth rather than an irrational quirk of state law) that death certificates are "not public records" and hence are available only to a few. It does acknowledge that it will make "genealogy" death certificates available for deaths more than 20 years ago -- and then offers only application forms that exclude the genealogy possibility.

The state archives are many hours away by car in a direction I rarely have occasion to travel.

The best option? None of the above. I logged on to Genlighten.com, looked for lookups in Springfield, Illinois, hired Molly Kennedy for less than any of the above figures, and received the desired death certificate within 1 (that's one) business day. What ever possessed me to do anything else in the first place?

Illinois Civil and Congressional Township Maps

Woops -- I should have posted on this months ago. (Hat tip to Melissa Barker in the Transitional Genealogists forum for getting the ball rolling about maps the other day.) There's a central although well-hidden on line resource for maps of each Illinois county showing townships. If you're visiting in person, you have a good chance of finding such a map at the courthouse or library, one that will also include roads and landmarks, as I did in northwestern Illinois' Whiteside County last fall. If you're visiting virtually, you can get there in six easy steps:

(1) Visit the Illinois State Archives regional depositories page, maintained by the office of Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White.

(2) On the left-hand menu, click on the second tab down for "IRAD region map."

(3) That will bring up a colorful map of Illinois divided into seven regions, each festooned with the initials of the depository university. Click on your region of choice.

(4) That will bring up a close-up map of the region and its counties. Click on your county of choice.

(5) That will bring up a "_____ County Fact Sheet." Enjoy the facts; don't get too focused; but then scroll down a few screens to a thumbnail outline map of the county with subdivisions, which are the townships. (Hey, it's a big thumbnail.)

(6) Click on the thumbnail and presto, you have a printable map of the county and its townships. And when I say townships, I mean BOTH KINDS, the civil townships (with names you are or soon will become familiar with) and the congressional townships, with names like T36N R5E in La Salle County, which due to rivers that disobey the rectangular survey system, is not quite the same as the civil township of Northville.

Drilling a little deeper in the Illinois State Archives online

Anyone with any research interest in Illinois at all has probably come across, and been appropriately grateful for, the three crown-jewel databases in the Illinois State Archives web site maintained by the secretary of state: the Illinois Statewide Marriage Index (1763-1900) and the Illinois Statewide Death Index (1916-1950) and the Illinois Statewide Death Index (pre-1916 but not done yet either). But if you go direct to these treasure troves (which include information on obtaining the original records), which I just made it easy for you to do (d'oh!), you'll miss some other goodies. The archives also has eleven online indexes of Illinois veterans starting with the War of 1812, plus an index of public domain land tract sales, and servitude and emancipation records 1722-1863.

But wait, there's more. For reasons best known to the politicians, many Illinois archival records are distributed around the state in 7 different IRADs (Illinois Regional Archives Depositories). The full list of holdings is in a PDF document here, but most of those you have to go see in person. What's even more helpful is that a selection of these has been indexed on line -- scroll down the main database page to the end, where you will find indexes to such gems as Shelby County Circuit Court Case Files 1828-1871, McLean County Will Records 1838-1940, Ogle County Naturalization Papers (County Court) 1878-1933, Sangamon County Guardian's Case Files 1825-1901, Chicago City Council proceedings 1833-1871, and... but you get the idea. Check it out and you may get lucky. I did.

Invitation to some inquests

Thanks to my Pittsburgh friend (and 5th cousin once removed) Jan for pointing out a post by Lisa Alzo at The Accidental Genealogist. (It's blog "for genealogists who like to write, and writers who happen to be genealogists!" -- how did I miss that one?) Lisa writes about The University of Pittsburgh Archive Services Center's Coroner Case File Project, preserving and making available Allegheny County coroner's inquest files from 1887 to 1973.

She's hoping that one o f these files will shed light on a probable murder among her relatives, but from some of the comments in the accompanying wiki I wouldn't count on it. One browser of the files reports, "I think that some of my case files [more than 100 years ago] that were ruled suicides were actually misdiagnosed or just plain wrong. In one file a man was found in the Allegheny River, his feet bound and stab wounds in his chest. The coroner ruled it a suicide..." Moral: always evaluate official sources with a wary eye.

These files are an unusual source for unusual circumstances (or, perhaps, for historical background). Similar files covering shorter time spans are also available through the Illinois State Archives' regional depositories for the Illinois counties of Cook, DeWitt, Macoupin, Vermilion, and Wayne.