Is Van Buren County Michigan's best-kept genealogical secret?

Last month I finally made it to Decatur, Michigan, home of the Van Buren District Library Local History Collection in the Webster Memorial Library and the Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society of Southwest Michigan.

Don't wait as long as I did. If you have research targets in Allegan, Berrien, Cass, Kalamazoo, or Van Buren counties, this is a must-see collection. Highlights of the collection include

• vital records, 
• newspapers from the 1850s, 
• plat books as early as 1860, 
• yearbooks, 
• Sanborn fire insurance maps on microfilm, 
• an obituary collection, 
• the Bess Britton Michigan One-Room Schoolhouse Collection, and 
• the Southwest Michigan Military Registry Project. 

If you need microfilm from Salt Lake City, you can order it sent to Decatur for viewing.

The department's rooms are packed full, and I hear there are prospects of expansion.

For more details, check out my previous posts mentioning the county or society or library.



Harold Henderson, "Is Van Buren County Michigan's best-kept genealogical secret?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Kind of Blog Every County Needs

Sonja Hunter at Bushwhacking Genealogy digs into the details of researching in Kalamazoo County, Michigan.




Harold Henderson, "The Kind of Blog Every County Needs," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

More resources in Kalamazoo

In addition to this previously blogged site, Kalamazoo County, Michigan, has a diligent genealogical society with a wide variety of unusual resources searchable on line, including insurance applications, suicides, peddling permits, and vigilance organizations.

They recently got a nice writeup from Valerie Beaudrault in the NEHGS's E-News (#470, 17 March), which actually has more detail on the resources than I could find on the KVGS web site.

Current projects in the works include databases of non-residential burial permits, women voters 1917-1936, and Kalamazoo County coroner's inquests. Volunteer here to help.

The ultimate online resource for Kalamazoo

There's a good meeting scheduled for Kalamazoo nine days from now, but if you just can't make it, don't despair -- there's an excellent online site for that county, combining indexes and digital images of original records. You're going to wish your ancestors camped there in 1830 and never left.

Let me count the goodies at the bare-bones site kalamazoogenealogy.org:

vital records indexes and images (page by page in the original books), with a link to local library information;

cemetery transcriptions and (some) images;

"family trees";

directories (for the city, nine between 1860 and 1915), transcriptions and images;

school yearbooks 1859-1976, transcriptions and images;

WWI veterans;

Schoolcraft Express obituaries 1917-1972 with a link to the Kalamazoo Library database; and

probate 1831-1857.

I found useful information about my only relative in the county, a peripatetic stonecutter, and his wife and children. Those of you with more relations here will have a blast.

"The Yankee West"

My first big shock of the New Year was realizing that I am apparently the only person on LibraryThing who owns a copy of Susan E. Gray's The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier, a microhistorical analysis of three townships in Kalamazoo County, Michigan between 1830 and 1860. (If you're a LibraryThing person who can find my techno-semiliterate mistake, please do so and post a comment!)

Even if you don't have people in the area, this book is full of insights about how things happen in predominantly Yankee or New Englander settlements in the Midwest in this crucial settlement time. (I read it avidly in the NFL playoff commercial breaks.) These folks believed in community/family values and they believed in commerce and commercial agriculture.

They were not confused, but their objective was fundamentally ambivalent: to create traditional rural communities of unlimited potential for economic growth. They wanted more of the same, only better. In realizing their goal, however, they altered forever the dialectic between market and morality. {15}

I learned about a new kind of source from her, too. She of course uses the population and agriculture census schedules, township tax rolls, and land records. But she also gets a lot out of Presbyterian and Congregational clergymen's letter reports to the New York office of the American Home Missionary Society. The explanation of how the timing of Michigan settlement, Indian "removal," and the 1840s depression made possible the survival of Ottawa Indians in the peninsula, and helped white settlers survive, is alone worth the price of admission. Please, buy this book and put it up on LibraryThing so I don't feel like quite such a geek!

Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society, Michigan

I just caught the note in the Paw Paw Courier-Leader (can't make these names up) that the Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society's annual pot luck meeting and white elephant auction is Monday night the 23rd at the society's mecca, the Webster Memorial Library in Decatur. Besides its namesake county, VBRGS covers the far-southwest Michigan counties of Allegan, Berrien, Cass, and Kalamazoo.

The society has a nice collection of online resources at the Van Buren County GenWeb site, including obituary and cemetery indexes. Its physical resources are in the Webster Library's Local History Room, and they include deed and other fundamental record indexes for several counties. (Check out their online catalog by title.) The Local History Room is itself worthy of note. It also acts as a borrowing agency for Family History Library films. This is a quality of holdings and services I don't see offered at many public libraries of this size. (Decatur's population is under 2,000.) Time to pay them a visit.