I almost went to the library by accident: agriculture schedules

Trying to pinpoint a landless research target in the 1850 census between his landowning neighbors, I realized I needed to see if they were also neighbors in the agriculture schedule -- and made a note to check those records next time I visited a library that held them. Then I remembered which century it is, and typed "Ancestry nonpopulation schedules" into Google -- much easier than trying to locate them within Ancestry -- and discovered that their on-line holdings of these underused resources have grown.

Still nothing for Indiana or Wisconsin, but the 1850-1880 agriculture schedules for most counties in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, can be browsed (at the township level, which is pretty quick) or searched. A total of 21 states are listed, including also Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York.



Harold Henderson, "I almost went to the library by accident: agriculture schedules," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History -- not quite what we thought

Hamlin Garland is not now a household word, if he ever was, and his late-Victorian writing style hasn't helped. But those seeking a realistic portrait of pioneering in the upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota) will enjoy reading A Son of the Middle Border. He spent his boyhood, youth, and young manhood pioneering and ended in 1893 telling his father Richard,

Father, you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey -- to what end? Here you are - snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and crippled.... You must take the back trail.

This message may be unwelcome to many 21st-century genealogists, as it was to the old Civil War veteran. But it's closer to real life than the sentimental sketches in the mug books being published around the same time.

Hamlin Garland was a man of his time. He maintained, and probably believed, the fiction that the Indians just "melted away" before white settlement. His critique of pioneering had nothing to do with the immorality of white people's stealing Indian land; it had to do with the resultant quality of life for the white people themselves.


A completely different approach to a similar subject is a recent working paper by economists on the results of the 1832 Cherokee land lottery, in which land recently "acquired" from Indians was offered at random to white settlers. The economists compared those who received the windfall with those who did not, using 1850 census data, and found that most of the benefits accrued, not to the poorest, but to middling and wealthy.

Almost two decades after the lottery, winners were, on average, $700 richer than a comparable population that did not win the lottery. The gains in wealth, however, are not evenly distributed among the lottery winners. Indeed, the poorest third of lottery winners were essentially as poor as the poorest third of lottery losers.

History is rarely what we expect; no wonder the future is so surprising.




Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1917).

Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph Ferrie, "Up from Poverty? The 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery and the Long-run Distribution of Wealth," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, 21 June 2013 version (http://home.uchicago.edu/~bleakley/Bleakley_Ferrie_Up.pdf : viewed 5 July 2013).


Harold Henderson, "History -- not quite what we thought," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

Tour the Pacific of 200 years ago in the April NYGBR

I shouldn't have been surprised -- but I was when I opened the April 2013 New York Genealogical and Biographical Record and found myself plunged into a series of trading voyages around and across the Pacific Ocean in the early 1800s, in the first installment of Edward E. Steele's lead article on Capt. William J. Pigot. Pigot and his family were New Yorkers all right, but he at least did not stay put. Steele combined a great story with great genealogy detective work to make sure the right story was being told about the right people.

(Those who read Steele's article will understand why this is the first genealogy article I ever read that brought to mind John Updike's early story, "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island," in Pigeon Feathers; now also in The New Yorker's subscriber-only online archive for 13 January 1962.)

More conventionally, I was pleased to find a crop of Midwesterners in the first installment of George R. Nye's account of the Preserved Fish Deuel family, with locations including Minnesota (Cottonwood, Faribault, McLeod, Brown, and Ramsey counties), Illinois (Lake County), Wisconsin (Waushara, Marquette, and Green Lake counties), and Iowa (Wright, Kossuth, and Osceola counties).

It's not a slam on the article to say that I enjoyed the footnotes just as much. As the author notes, the article "demonstrates the types of sources and analysis that can be used to document a family" even when vital records are few and far between. Among the alternatives employed were the hybrid township-military records created by many New York town clerks during the Civil War, documenting not only the service but genealogically relevant facts about soldiers from their area.

East-central Ohio (Coshocton, Licking, and Fairfield counties) also was a landing place for one descendant of the Pine-Pettit-Dorlon connection documented in the concluding part of Robert J. Meyers' account.




Edward E. Steele, "William J. Pigot, Captain of the Forester," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 85-100.

George R. Nye, "Children and Grandchildren of Preserved Fish7 Deuel of Cambridge and Massena, New York," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 123-39.

Robert J. Meyers, "A Pine-Pettit-Dorlon Connection: Untangling the Family of Elias D. Pine (1793-1866) of Hempstead, Long Island, New York (concluded)," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 140-54.



Harold Henderson, "Tour the Pacific of 200 years ago in the April NYGBR," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

Midwesterners in the latest Genealogist

The Genealogist, published twice yearly, is one of the less well known of the top five US genealogy publications. The Spring 2013 issue includes two articles chronicling Midwesterners -- and Marjean Holmes Workman's article makes a significant revision in the Burris family: "Robert James Burris" and his wife "Susan Rebecca Miller" were not two people but four -- brothers who married sisters. In this first of two segments, this family of Burrises inhabited at least nine Ohio counties (Franklin, Madison, Ross, Hardin, Fayette, Van Wert, Marion, Paulding, and "Piqua" [Pickaway!]), eight Indiana counties (Jay, Adams, Jefferson, Grant, Allen, Montgomery, Hamilton, and Henry), and one county in Iowa (Guthrie). It pays to keep up with the latest research!

In the first installment of Gale Ion Harris's account, the James and Lydia Waters family were mainly in Kentucky but also in Clermont (now Brown) County, Ohio, and Bureau County, Illinois.




Marjean Holmes Workman, "The Family of Joseph Burris[s] of Maryland and Madison County, Ohio: Discovering an Unrecorded Marriage," The Genealogist 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 51-74.

Gale Ion Harris, "Descendants of James1 and Lydia (Guyton) Waters of Harford County, Maryland: Ohio River Valley Families," The Genealogist 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 75-98.



Harold Henderson, "Midwesterners in the latest Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Josephus Waters Family in The Genealogist

One of the greatest services a genealogist can do for colleagues and researchers everywhere is to publish results that distinguish families that are easily confused -- especially ones involving a common name or one that's hard to search for. In the fall issue of The Genealogist, Gale Ion Harris takes up the family of pioneer surveyor Josephus Burton Waters (1750?-1826?) of Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky. He has also described, and will be describing further, the apparently unrelated but nearby Isaac Waters family. I hope more of us will be inspired to publish our "wrong" families, and not leave their evidence on the cutting-room floor!

Seven of Josephus's children had children. The author notes that there may be a few more unidentified, and still succeeds in locating 54 grandchildren. Many family members stayed in Kentucky; others dispersed to Texas, Louisiana, Oregon, and California, as well as various Midwestern counties: Marion and Jefferson in Illinois; Jennings in Indiana; Highland, Clermont, and Brown in Ohio; Jackson in Missouri; and Scott, Washington, Taylor, Wapello, and Lucas in Iowa. For reasons not made clear the author sometimes rested content with derivative sources for wills, deeds, newspapers, and court records, but other Waters family researchers need not look this spirited gift horse in the mouth, as enough information is available for them to fill in those omissions.



Gale Ion Harris, "Josephus Burton Waters of Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky: A Pioneer Surveyor," The Genealogist 26, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 272-93.


Harold Henderson, "Josephus Waters Family in The Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Midwesterners in the new NYGBR

Indiana has an author in the new July 2011 issue of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, of the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, chronicles John and Elizabeth (Halbert) Blair of Ontario and Yates Counties, New York. John was a Massachusetts minuteman and quite possibly was also involved in Shays' rebellion prior to his move to western New York.

This article is only the first installment, but already Blair descendants with various surnames are traced into Ohio (Crawford, Defiance, Geauga, Richland, and Williams counties), Indiana (Allen and La Porte counties), Michigan (Hillsdale and Monroe counties), Iowa (Allamakee, Clayton, and Decatur counties); and Kansas (Osage County).

Two good free resources via Scout Report

The Internet Scout Project dates back to the DOS and maybe even the green-screen Apple era, and they're still at it. Recently they highlighted two genealogically useful resources:

From the Iowa Digital Library, a collection on African American Women in Iowa. There are a variety of resources here, with more scope than the title makes it sound. Being a text guy, I gravitated to the typewritten 27 June 1963 newsletter of the Fort Madison NAACP. It is (I must say) rather like a blog, with lots of specific news entries: "Freesmeier's Dairy has hired one of our number, Thomas Humburd," calling off the boycott and encouraging patronage. And it is searchable!

And completely searchable images of "every known issue" of Chicago's Hyde Park Herald, covering most of the 1880s and then everything since 1926 -- a primo resource right into the 21st century!

Aerial photo books from the 1950s

Those who do 20th-century Midwestern genealogy may already know about this series of county histories whose most desirable feature at this distance in time is their aerial photographs of named farms in a couple dozen Illinois counties and a few in Iowa, Indiana, and Wisconsin. A larger list is available on WorldCat, where I searched on "american aerial history county series." Many are available on line at Internet Archive (first link above) and other locations.

Make the most of the ag census on methodology monday

Ever since I discovered the existence of agriculture schedules for the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, I've been so amazed that I can know how many pigs my ancestors slopped and how much maple syrup they spent endless spring hours cooking down.

So I've promoted these schedules as a way to add flesh to a skeletal family tree. What was grown, or not grown on the farm; how it compared to its neighbors at the time; how it developed (or failed to develop) over time -- all can tell a lot about what it was like to grow up and live there. Now I have even more reasons and fewer excuses to use these scandalously under-used records.

The "fewer excuses" part is that Ancestry now has agriculture schedules on line for fourteen states including Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan. They're under the obtuse heading of "Selected US Federal Census Non-Population Schedules, 1850-1880," which is not included in the drop-down menu of other US censuses.

One caution if you haven't dealt with these in microfilm or hard copy before: In 1850 the entries for each farm are so numerous they stretch across two pages. On the left side of one page are the names and the first set of entries, and then on the back side of that page (the following image in Ancestry) are the remaining numbers. So to get all the good stuff you need to click forward and match up line numbers. (This also means that every knowledgeable citation to these records will refer to two page numbers, not just one!)

The "more reasons" part is that the agriculture schedule is not a perfect mirror of the population schedule. This means at least two things. One, some people show up there who own no property according to the population schedule (either a mistake was made or they are "managers"). Two, some people have their names grossly mangled in one schedule and not in another. A man who is probably not a relative of my wife (another story!) is indexed in Genesee County, New York, as "Rosabel" in the population schedule, but more accurately as "Roswell" in the agriculture schedule. I'm sure there's more, but the point remains the same: this data set is a must-do for any serious researcher.

Sixty Million Acres!

Thanks to the helpful folks on the Transitional Genealogists list, I have now purchased and read James W. Oberly's detailed study, Sixty Million Acres: American Veterans and the Public Lands before the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990). It's definitely worth your time if you deal regularly with bounty-land recipients under the four different Congressional acts passed in 1847, 1850, 1852, and 1855, which together involved most veterans of most wars from the War of 1812 through the Mexican War. It's also good microscopic historical background, connecting these laws with the changing politics of that era, and also reviewing and modifying past interpretations by earlier generations of historians.

Oberly starts with the politics: how Congress decided how to distribute the public land (it all started with the need to boost recruitment pronto during the Mexican War), how the administrative offices implemented distribution, and how the recipients (veterans and widows) used their warrants.

At the time, there was much concern about speculators monopolizing land or bilking veterans. Oberly finds little evidence that they did, but they did make some windfall profits.

The expectation that these warrants would spark additional settlement by the veterans themselves was also not fulfilled. (A very rough comparison: if the government offered Alaskan bush land to Vietnam-era veterans now, how many would choose to go?) In Oberly's random sample of warrants, fewer than 5 percent of the recipients used them to "locate" land for themselves. {92} Most warrants were sold, often through middlemen, and there were intertwined national and local markets for them. The market seems to have been competitive, and somewhat volatile. In general Oberly thinks the sellers did OK. (Genealogical lesson #1: if you find such a warrant in use, the odds are very good that the person who took up the land was not the original recipient and quite possibly not a veteran of any of those wars.)

The line of settlement pretty much determined where the warrants ended up being located: Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin together make up roughly half the acreage, with Missouri and Minnesota close behind. {85} Southern states were underrepresented in part because the big boom state in those years was Texas, which had its own public-lands system inherited from its brief independence.

Methodology Monday with three census names for one person

You think the census is wrong? Way wrong? Read this article to get an idea of what you may need to do to prove it.

Midwesterners are the main fare in "Untangling Intertwined Branches: Caroline McNeill and Caroline Spencer in Lee County and Marion County, Iowa," by Marieta A. Grissom, CG, in the September 2009 National Genealogical Society Quarterly. She proves that 7-year-old Caroline McNeil in 1850, 12-year-old Issabelle Spencer in 1856, and 18-year-old Caroline Spencer in 1860, all in Warren and Nancy McNeil's household, are the same person...who was not a child of the McNeils. The journey involves censuses, vital records, probate records, and more in several counties and three states.

The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia

This year a kind and generous Santa brought me The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia, an 1891-page behemoth edited by Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton. (Cayton, as faithful readers of this blog already know, wrote the wonderful Frontier Indiana.) Their "Midwest" is more inclusive than this blog's: besides Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, it includes Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and both Dakotas.

The encyclopedia's 22 chapters each contain many individual articles by expert authors with additional reading suggestions. They run from geography to small-town life to military affairs, but its index has no entry for "genealogy." It's all relevant, of course, but of particular interest to genealogists may be "Cultural Geography" (p. 145), "Peoples" (p. 177), "Language" (p. 278), and the brief sketch of "State and Local Historical Societies" (p. 654). As a fan of Cayton's "General Overview" (p. xix), I'll give him the floor:

The conquest, settlement, and development of what we call the Midwest is one of the most important events in the past quarter millennium of human history. In the nineteenth century, millions of people entered this interior region, forcibly displaced thousands of American Indians, and established a society that dominated North America and much of the globe throughout the twentieth century. This breathtaking transformation amounts to one of the most all-encompassing and significant revolutions in the history of the world. ...

The Midwest in fact is not the land of the bland, but a collection of disparate communities held together, more or less, by a civic culture that transcends (or at least ignores) differences...

Read the whole thing.

Cato Mead in Lee County, Iowa

Marian Pierre-Louis on the APG email list points to an article in the Daily Gate City (Keokuk, Iowa), about a Memorial Day observance involving Cato Mead, one of the few black Revolutionary War veterans buried west of the Mississippi. Originally from Norwich, Connecticut, he came to southeast Iowa in 1840 and lived there six years before his death at the age of 79.

(FYI, Keokuk is at the triple corner of Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois.)

The Minds of the West, first take

Where better to get buyer's remorse than when you buy a book or CD amid the excitement of a genealogy meeting? It's a definite risk. I picked up Jon Gjerde's The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West 1830-1917 at the DuPage County gathering last month, and I'm about a quarter of the way through and still happy.

Gjerde has some interesting and deep things to say about the nature of the Midwest, starting back when it was (as the title suggests) simply "the West," and caused no end of worry to fretful New Englanders and nativists in general. More on that later. Right now I'm noticing how vividly he shows how genealogy and history are just opposite ends of a whole spectrum of ways to study the past, and how the big picture and the little picture are both valid and shed light on each other.

Instead of just talking about the family factor in migration, he uses the diary of Sarah Browne Armstrong Adamson to follow her feelings in the later 1830s and early 1840s as her children move on from their Fayette County, Ohio, home to greener pastures in faraway Iowa -- and then when she hears that her daughter and granddaughter have died there. {83-85} Suffice to say it's the kind of grieving white people don't do any more.

The diary was transcribed by Carol Benning and reposes in the archives of the Cedar Falls [Iowa] Historical Society, which offers lots of regular genealogical fare including census records, marriage records, probates, directories, and a name-by-name Civil War roster.

Genealogizing outside the lines...

The wonderful Genblogfinder tempts me to stretch my definition of the Midwest:

On our far right-hand side, Pittsburgh will be hosting the August 1-3 meeting of the FEEFHS, the Federation of East European Family History Societies. The conference blog lists speakers and topics including "Austria-Hungary" (in two parts, naturally), "Recruiting Rules of the Austrian Army," "Russian Empire Research," and "Polish Archives: Behind the Scenes in Gdansk & Poznan." Conference blogs don't tend to be cutting-edge, but it does give me a warm fuzzy feeling that people are working these resources.

On our left-hand side, the Davenport (Iowa) Public Library's Richardson-Sloane Special Collections Center, AKA "Quad City Memory," is blogging at "Primary Selections from Special Collections." Recent posts include generous excerpts from Capt. Chester Barney's unique and wry recollections of the Civil War, and a cliffhanger about Davenport barber, foot doctor, and ex-slave General Houston.

Indiana identities in NGSQ

We're used to reading technical articles about ferreting out who's who in colonial New England. The new (December) issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly (available in many libraries, but on-line only to members) brings an eastern Indiana detective story of the same kind by Dawne Slater-Putt, M.L.S., CG, of Huntertown.

It starts with two Fayette County, Indiana, census records, and the kind of conclusion we're all tempted to jump to.

1850: Eleanor Nash, age 16, in the Fayette County, Indiana, household of Richard and Margaret.
1860: Eleanor Saxon, age 27, in the same household with three Saxon children.

Eleanor must've married a Saxon and been widowed, right? Well, Fayette County records show no such marriage, and they do show Eleanor Nash marrying a Joseph Turner in 1857. Uh-oh.

This is the point where most amateurs throw up their hands and look for another line to study. Slater-Putt is a pro, and she finds the answer after "research on extended Nash and Saxon families in several counties in two states and careful evidence analysis," laid out in nine closely reasoned pages of text. No spoilers here, and yes, it's technical, but it's exactly what we need in order to make sure we're telling stories about the right ancestors.

Searching County Biographies on line, part 1

Dennis Partridge reports on his blog Genealogy Research that he's adding biographies from John Forkner's 1914 History of Madison County, Indiana, to the free online site Access Genealogy. Anyone who can remember, or imagine, being confronted with a ten-pound century-old book full of biographies of the upper and middle crust of a given county, in no particular order, with no index of any kind, will want to thank him.

As of 27 Jan 2008, AG claims to have 14,478 biographies in its biography center. The collection is searchable by surname; some individual titles are searchable and browsable, but not all. There's also a feature allowing you to browse biographies in which a given state is mentioned.

It's not clear how many different books (as opposed to individual biographies) they have included (Partridge says he's halfway through the Madison County inputting process). Most listings appear to be transcripts retyped from the originals. Some listings give better citations than others. At one extreme, there's full citation information and page images for the 1897 History of the Scandinavians and Successful Scandinavians in the United States covering Iowa and Wisconsin. At the other extreme, the biographies pertaining to Ida County, Iowa, are said to have been "extracted from numerous sources" not given, although there's an email address to contact the compiler.

Given the possibility of typing errors, best research procedure would be to use this as a finding aid (and what a finding aid it is!) and following up by consulting the underlying books, when you can get to Salt Lake City or Fort Wayne or wherever worldcat.org tells you they're available.

Midwestern coverage, as far as I can tell, is reasonable but not lavish. Two book titles are listed separately under Wisconsin. Otherwise, the state browse function produces 2659 hits for Illinois, 2625 for Ohio, 1553 for Indiana, 696 for Wisconsin, and 658 for Michigan. Most of these are mentions of the state in biographies published elsewhere. (I see this as a feature rather than a bug.)

This is by no means the only free site where the late 1800s and early 1900s county histories are being indexed and made available, either in transcriptions or images, but it has the merit of making them searchable across the board, not just within each book. That's a great help when you're looking for that pesky relative or ancestor who moved around a lot.