June APGQ -- another magazine on the "must-read" shelf

For those who are members of the Association of Professional Genealogists, the June 2015 issue of the APG Quarterly just went on line. Yes, it's late, but it's looking like a quarterly full of articles I want to read and need to read -- and a real incentive for serious genealogists who are not yet members to join APG.

No, I'm not impartial. My own article, "A Field Guide to Indirect Evidence," is in the mix -- that was supposed to be the reason for this blog post! And I do chair the quarterly's advisory committee (but aside from my article, we had no involvement in the process).

Nor have I had a chance to read through it. But who couldn't find several things to love in the regular reviews and interviews, and the rest of the table of contents?

* Lisa Alzo interviewing four professionals on staying professional on social media.
* Sara Scribner on JSTOR and LibGuides. (Yes, I did say, "What's a LibGuide?")
* Barbara Ball on georeferencing.
* Marian Pierre-Louis on making sure you put your best online foot forward.
* George Morgan on organization for presenters.
* Michael Hait on the difference between a report and a case study. (Anyone going for certification without knowing this? Time to find out!)
* Blaine Bettinger on Genetic Genealogy Standards.

Locals and cosmopolitans in genealogy

Genealogists divide up in many ways: young and old, amateur and professional, those who know who Tom Jones and Elizabeth Shown Mills are and those who don't. Another, similar, lesser-known divide is the one separating locals and cosmopolitans.

These terms come out of 20th-century sociology. One classic source is available free on JSTOR, as long as you read sociologese: Alvin W. Gouldner, "Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles," Administrative Science Quarterly 2 [December 1957]:281-306. Technically, these terms describe people's loyalties or behaviors that they and their fellows aren't necessarily fully aware of -- whether their main loyalties are to their localities (often where they grew up) or to a non-local set of standards or procedures. Gouldner was actually writing about 20th-century corporations, elaborating on the difference between "company men" and "experts." My personal take is that if you ask people whether they loved high school or couldn't wait to get out, those who loved it would mostly turn out to be locals and those who left ASAP would mostly be cosmopolitans.

Genealogy in many ways is based on microscopic local knowledge. Often it's critical to know what the local insane asylum was called in the 1870s, or all the different names a particular rural graveyard had. So localism in genealogy cannot be disparaged as ignorant provincialism the way it might be in physics or chemistry. And it's certainly not incompatible with high standards and wide knowledge.

In the long run and in the hard cases genealogy also requires a problem-solving orientation that cuts across many localities -- especially in the US where so many people moved so often. And since many of us ourselves move often, and didn't enjoy high school, genealogy also attracts people who are themselves inclined to be locals only on occasion and only by choice.

In my limited experience, local societies tend to be dominated by "locals" in this sense. This may only become obvious when the meeting's program consists of members sharing stories about their first day of school -- and almost everyone is of course talking about schools within a few miles of the society's meeting place. Also in my experience, locals may tend to have a skeptical attitude, verging on self-satisfaction, toward non-local expertise and non-local societies.

Do you find these concepts helpful? Do you have your own local/cosmopolitan stories? Or are you both?


Harold Henderson, "Locals and cosmopolitans in genealogy," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

ProQuest Historical Newspapers(TM) in Academic Libraries

Genealogy is local, but we're not. Often we need access to newspapers in distant places. Some digitized titles are available by subscription. Some subscriptions are not available or affordable to individuals. ProQuest is one such, and in my experience libraries tend to subscribe to it just for their own localities if at all.

Here's where academic libraries can help the determined researcher, even if he or she is not formally affiliated there. Those libraries that allow the public (most, in my experience) have not only scholarly article databases like JStor, they may also subscribe to an interesting variety of ProQuest Historical Newspapers (TM), which has impressive runs of 38 titles. Those of particular Midwestern import in the ProQuest fold are the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Defender, Cleveland Call and Post, Detroit Free Press, Indianapolis Star, Louisville Courier Journal, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Public computers at one Midwestern university library recently had about half of the 38 titles listed at the above link. These were not for printing out or emailing, however, so be prepared to take notes the old-fashioned way. In actual use the titles are not consistent, so a continuous run of an Atlanta paper, for instance, actually involves several titles, not all of them alphabetized under "A."


UPDATE POSTED MONDAY MORNING: Over on the Transitional Genealogists Forum, Michele Lewis just posted word of a useful low-budget resource for those seeking on-line newspapers, on Wikipedia. And of course, being Wikipedia, it's a resource we can all contribute to.

Harold Henderson, "ProQuest Historical Newspapers(TM) in Academic Libraries," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]