The Gedney family of Illinois, and why writing is still compulsory for genealogists

Suddenly more than one-third of 2017 is history! Two other articles of mine have seen the light of day:

“Yes, Writing Is Compulsory! Here’s How to Make It Work,” Federation of Genealogical Societies Forum 29 (Spring 2017): 18-21.

I hope this will inspire others to turn their research into readable and documented stories, and not leave an indigestible lump of disorganized notes (which is generally what I start with!). It is not enough to leave a database or a stack of papers. Thanks to FGS's Julie Cahill Tarr for making sure I got it done.

“From Fens to Farms: William and Rebecca (Wright) Gedney of Cowbit, Lincolnshire and Lebanon, Illinois,” Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly (Spring 2017): 30-34.

Thanks to ISGSQ editor Terry Feinberg for helping nudge this into the right length and shape (William and Rebecca and their children), and for instituting footnotes instead of endnotes in the quarterly!

This is my maternal grandfather's mother's line; the bulk of the family came to the U.S. in 1842 (John Tyler was president), sailing from Liverpool to New Orleans and then traveling up the Mississippi to St. Clair County, Illinois, opposite St. Louis. Some children arrived earlier; it was a chain-like migration. William and Rebecca's twelve children, born 1805-1832, had a total of more than two dozen grandchildren. Seven of the twelve lived to have children, and married into families surnamed Green, Wilson, Flint (twice), Lord (twice), Sims, Frost, Eastwood, Barton, Thornton, and Sowers.

I need to figure out the best way(s) to publish the much longer four-generation story, as many family members spilled into Missouri and Kansas while others stayed rooted in Illinois.

Analyzing too much information with William Flint (1815-1878)

Often we have to eke out one precious fact at a time by analyzing and correlating terse and scattered records. But in the case of the agriculture schedules of the U.S. census (1850-1880), we have to find ways to  make sense of a cornucopia of information.

See how I did it for my great-great grandfather William Flint of St. Clair County, Illinois, in the new Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly (membership required). And if this puts you in mind of an Illinois topic you want to write about, managing editor Julie Cahill Tarr would love to hear from you.



Harold Henderson, "William Flint's Farm: Digging Deeper," Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly 46 (Spring 2014): 5-8.


Image: S.D. Fisher, ed., Transactions of the Department of Agriculture, State of Illinois, with Reports from County Agricultural Boards, for the Year 1879 (Springfield: Weber & Co., 1880), 66.


Harold Henderson, "Analyzing too much information with William Flint (1815-1878)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Letters from Illinois to England 1850

More than a quarter of the current 64-page Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly is given over to letters describing northern Illinois as of 160 years ago. "The Letters of John Wightwick of Tenterden, Kent, England and St. Charles, Kane County, Illinois," was contributed by descendant Lillian S. DeHart of New York.

Part of the family emigrated in 1850; the eight letters were mostly written in that year but extend up to 1853 when some of the family were in Chicago. The writers exchanged family information, Methodist exhortations, descriptions of American life, and pleas for loans so that they could not only purchase land but get a house and fence on it. The Americans, John commented 10 August 1850,

generally have three meals a day, animal food at every meal. They seldom have anything cold, Their stoves are exceedingly hand and convenient. Can bake bread or cakes in a very short time, fit for the table in an hour for instance. As the farmers keep cows and poultry there are many eggs, custard pudding, cream etc. etc., ice cream etc. . . . As this part of Illinois is an infant state there is not much fruit at present. The trees are all young, . . . They do not farm very well. They do not plough their ground very well, plough only about 3 or 4 inches in general and harrow very little so their land is very rough . . . they will find they must manage their land instead of throwing it away instead.

Clearly just transcribing the letters was a labor of love, as they were written cross-hatch style first across the paper and then up and down over the previous writing. Annotations are sparse.

The whole business of publishing old letters tends to be a bit random, and this reader would have appreciated more annotations as to who was speaking to whom in the family, and any other Illinois and England context that was known. But as I know from working in this genre, that is a pit as bottomless as genealogy itself!

Those of us with less articulate English ancestors in the Midwest at this date will greatly appreciate this glimpse of how the Wightwicks saw their new home. Join ISGS and get your copy of the whole thing!


Lillian S. DeHart, comp., "The Letters of John Wightwick of Tenterden, Kent, England and St. Charles, Kane County, Illinois," Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 13-30, 48.

Harold Henderson, “Letters from Illinois to England 1850,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific article if you mention this post online.]

Women's mug books!

The current Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly's cover story, "'The Grandmothers' of Aurora" by Michael R. Fichtel, describes an obscure book he found in the Aurora [Kane County] Historical Society: Reminiscences Prepared From Written and Verbal Recitals of the Personal Experience of "The Grandmothers" of Aurora in Early Pioneer Life in Illinois. The book (which does not appear in WorldCat) appears to have been compiled as a fundraiser for a WCTU rally in 1892; it contains 48 biographical sketches of elderly Aurora women, all of which are reprinted in the magazine. (It's a keeper.)

A few months ago, working on behalf of a client, I ran into a similar publication (which does appear in WorldCat), Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve, edited by Mrs. Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham, apparently originally published in bi-monthly installments in the 1890s, under the auspices of the Women's Department of the Cleveland Centennial Commission. The inadequate indexing of the book almost drove me crazy but the content is a welcome (and historically beneficial) change from the overwhelmingly masculine and downright patriarchal viewpoints of the ordinary mug books produced in this period.

Have you seen any books like these in other areas?

Winter 2009 Illinois State Quarterly

Three feature articles stand out in the current issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly:

* Sheryl Trudgian Jones tells the story behind the story of the Lillian Trudgian diaries of Galena, Illinois, now playing on her blog, "Leaves on the Trudgian Tree."

* Eric Willey enumerates the sources for Illinois divorce records from 1809 to 1961. Believe it or not, there are some statewide indexes!

* David C. Bailey, Sr., gives the first part of Union Civil War burials in Scott County.

Methodology Monday with the ISGSQ

The Fall issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly seems especially puzzle-oriented. I'll get to the feature stories tomorrow; here are the puzzles:

* "Illinois Connections of Richard Milhous Nixon" poses the puzzle that one source gives the final resting place of Revolutionary War veteran George Nixon Sr. as Glenwood Cemetery, Coal Valley, Rock Island County, Illinois. Another places him in Glenwood Cemetery, Colona, Henry County, Illinois. What is not mentioned but makes the puzzle more piquant is that these two places are only about seven miles apart. Are they really two different places? Being as it's fall, it might be more fun to solve this by going outdoors rather than googling.

* An 1817 grant of land to War of 1812 veteran John Adams was found in Henry County deed records. Adams' ownership predated the existence of both the state and the county, but evidently it was in either his or a subsequent owner's interest to record the fact at a later time. Whether Adams has any interested descendants has not been determined...yet.

* Editor Oriene Morrow Springstroh presents her research exercise in identifying the author of an interesting Civil War soldier's letter from Texas. The author has no living descendants, so the letter's ultimate destination remains undetermined.

* Finally, a straightforward transcription from a late 19th-century "mug book" biography of John S. Sloan, born and married in McLean County, Illinois, but written up later in life in Hamilton County, Iowa. If Sloan himself were your ancestor, you'd be unlikely to miss this. But if you were stuck on his brother Richard or sister Kate (Sloan) Holland, it might take an effort to think of seeking their information in their brother John's life story.

Illinois Summer Quarterly

A striking cover photo highlights the main feature and makes the summer issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly stand out.

"The Coles County Poor Farm Cemetery," by Sally M. Smith. "I discovered that, yes, the cemetery is there, but you can't get to it. It's overgrown with weeds and the only way in is to go through the police gun range on the Coffey farm."*

"The Association of Graveyard Rabbits," by Julie Cahill Tarr. (Currently there are five.)

"Bingham-Gracey-McGahey Family Letters," transcribed and annotated by Phyllis J. Bauer. Includes pictures and a genealogical summary.*

"Confessions of an Eclectic Researcher," by James E. Byrne.

"Schwemm Families: Connecting the Dots," by Patricia S. Schultz.

"Can You Find St. Charles in 1865?" by Harold Henderson (that's me). Unraveling Ancestry.com's faulty indexing of that year's state census in Kane County.*

"Ask the Retoucher!" by Eric Curtis M. Basir

"Faces from the Past: Identifying Photos with Marge Rice."

"Family Bible Collections," tr. Kristy Lawrie Gravlin. Conklin, Patten, Lawhorn/Hill, Cassingham, Brown, Hampton/Conley, and Crawley family Bible records, which will eventually go into ISGS's third volume of this nature.

*footnoted.