The February Aggregator: more resources for Indiana, Ohio, Michigan,and

Cleaning out my mailbox so I can fill up yours!

Valerie Beaudrault at the New England Historical and Genealogical Society's "Weekly Genealogist" has spotted three collections of 20th-century obituaries on line for Randolph County, Indiana, and Darke County, Ohio, 1934-1948; Perry County, Indiana, 2001- ; and Garrett, DeKalb County, Indiana,1975-2012.

Not a database but a nice reminder of the value of store records appears in the Winter 2012 American Ancestors (also published by NEHGS), in particular the 51 volumes of "ledgers, journals, cash, day, inventory, and invoice books dating from 1882 to 1946" for S. Stern & Co. of Marcellus, Cass County, Michigan (southwest of Kalamazoo), now held at the Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collection. I have not viewed this collection, but if it is like some other business records, it may include information about the store's suppliers around the country as well as its customers in the immediate area.

Midwestern campus history is also burgeoning, with photo archives of Illinois Wesleyan University (Bloomington, McLean County) and a century of University of Iowa yearbooks (1892-1992).

CARLI: Illinois online collections give it the old college try

Since 2006, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois has maintained digital collections, now 75 of them on a variety of topics. You can browse them by name, by topic, by medium, or by institution.

I found a couple of alumni profiles on page 6 of The Elite Journal for 10 January 1890 (volume 3, number 15, but the earliest number so far digitized). In the class of 1875, F. H. Cumming was born in Hancock County but came to Illinois Wesleyan from Onarga, Iroquois County; Jabez Applebee was born in Whiteside County but entered college from Farmington, Fulton County.

I also found my mom's December 1943 graduation photo from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago (a framed copy of which hung on the wall of our back porch for many years).

It's worth browsing the collections just to know what's there. You can search across all collections, or search just one once you've narrowed down your focus. Once you're down to the page (or article) level, however, you're on your own.

A few of the potentially promising collections:
Benedictine University alumni directory 1887-1937,
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Civil War Collection,
Bloomington-Normal Local History Resources from Illinois Wesleyan University,
Booth Library Postcards from Eastern Illinois University,
Chicago aerial photographs from the University of Illinois at Chicago,
Great Lakes Digital Collection from the Newberry Library,
Historical Society Newsletters (Schuyler, McDonough, Hancock, and Rock Island) from Western Illinois University,
Historical Collections from Chicago State University,
Hull-House Yearbooks from 1906 from the University of Illinois at Chicago,
Letters Received by John Wesley Powell 1869-1879 from Illinois Wesleyan University,
Local History Resources from the University of Illinois at Springfield,
Noah Hart Papers (Civil War materials including the siege of Atlanta) from Dominican University,
Midwestern Railroads Documents and Images from Knox College,
The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly from 1950 from North Park University, and
William R. Townsend's Civil War Diary 1863-1864 from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Hat tip to Scout Report on the Illinois Wesleyan publications going back to January 1890.

Statewide Illinois Harvest

Newly digitized books of statewide interest at Illinois Harvest. The first two are also available on Google Book Search.

Peck, John Mason. A Gazetteer of Illinois. Jacksonville, IL: R. [actually C.] Goudy, 1834. 376 pages.

Carpenter, W. H. The History of Illinois, from Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857. 255 pages.

DeMotte, H. C. The Alumni Journal [of the Illinois Wesleyan University]. Bloomington:[Illinois Wesleyan University], Volume 2 (1872), Volume 3 (1873), Volume 4 (1874).

Caton, John Dean. Early Bench and Bar of Illinois. Chicago: Chicago Legal News Company, 1893. 252 pages.

Book of Memorial Memberships. Jacksonville, IL:s.n., 1929. 3rd edition. 212 pages. Illinois College. Portraits and brief biographies of close to 200 individuals, including a number of WWI casualties.