Articles from Ohio!

Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly 50(3) Fall 2010

"The Cordwainer's Journey," by Rena Glover Goss, pp. 113-118

"Caleb Hall, Franklin and Delaware Counties, Ohio," by Joe R. Winney, pp. 137-145


Ohio Genealogy News 41(3), Fall 2010

"Bad River Rising: The Charles W. Croner Family and the 1913 Piqua Flood," by Joyce Quigley, pp. 13-15

"History of the Warren County, Ohio Obituary Project," by Arne H. Trelvik, pp. 17-18

Watchdog Wednesday with FamilySearch Labs in Jefferson County, Ohio

OK, time for some hard-core research help if anyone shares my distress with the online images of Jefferson County, Ohio, tax records on FamilySearch Labs. These are important records since census information for Ohio is way sparse in these early years.

The FSL site gives little information on these records and no table of contents, so even though these records cover every year from 1816 to 1828, a search on a name returns an image that is impossible to place in chronology unless you develop your own yearly table of contents. Note: this record set currently contains four eastern Ohio counties, and the only one I have dealt with is Jefferson. Anyone willing to share similar information for Columbiana, Guernsey, or Harrison counties is more than welcome. (Those using the underlying microfilm may experience a similar problem; I haven't done so.)

There are two time series for Jefferson, 1816-1825 (493 images) and 1826-1828 (699 images). For any given name search result, you can click over to the image. When that opens, the upper-right-hand corner will indicate which image you are at out of either 493 or 699. That tells you which era you are in (but only if you know the code). Within each era, you need to know at which image each year starts. Here is the table of contents as I have found it for the first series:

1816 tax records start at image 435 of 493
1817 tax records start at 464 of 493
1818 tax records start at image 1 of 493
1819 = image 30
"1819 and 1820" = image 62
1821 = image 129
1822 = image 184
1823 = image 256
1824 = image 312
1825 = image 434

In the second series of 699 images,

1826 = image 1
1827 = image 240
1828 = image 482

In some years, there are little extras thrown in (browse around image 60 in the first series) and as time goes on I think various kinds of taxes are listed separately. IOW, your research target may appear more than once under 1827 -- don't miss him!

Yes, I think this has implications for how to cite these records properly, but that is way beyond the scope of this blog post, especially at this time of night. Hope this helps!

OGS Quarterly for fall

Three families are featured in articles in the fall 2009 Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly:

"Newstedt Family -- Syke, Hannover, Germany to Cincinnati, Ohio," by Charles Knighton -- a true story about three teenage immigrant brothers.

"The Legacy of Lewis Seitz, Ohio Pioneer," by Karl Seitz. Lewis was involved in a migration from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Fairfield County, Ohio, based on his church's strong disapproval of slavery and their determination to have no "communion or visible fellowship" with slaveholders.

"The Mystery of Abraham Tope," by Eric E. Johnson, a War of 1812 soldier from Jefferson County who supposedly died in the war, but apparently didn't. The mystery is clarified but not fully solved -- will more records do the trick?