Pretty good news for Kane County Illinois land researchers

Quietly, the Kane County, Illinois, Recorder's office has placed all of its deeds (and several other kinds of documents) on line. Basically this is good news but there are a few qualifiers as described in the following quickie tutorial:

(1) Few genealogists will be using the tab that says "Search Land Records" --the straightforward grantee and grantor search only works for deeds since 1980. The interface for older deeds is somewhat klunky, but structurally it's the same that we go through in person: first find promising entries in the grantee and grantor indexes, then find the deeds themselves in the deed books.

(2) The grantee and grantor indexes are reached by going to the tab "View Miscellaneous Documents," then "All Miscellaneous Documents," and then choosing "Grantee Index" (actually a whole bunch of volumes of grantee indexes) or "Grantor Index" from the resulting menu. Under "Grantee Index" there's a list of books identified by volume number and year. Pick your book and then pay attention to the, um, unique patented method that a previous recorder chose to use for indexing. (It's called "Dennick's Universal Chart System of Indexing, patented in 1893, and explained below ** as it will take a while.)

(3) Once you've found a book and page number to consult in the deed books themselves, go back to the beginning and hit the tab "Books," under that "Document Books," under that "Folders" (actually original deed books), pick the desired volume number, and then within that volume the page.

(4) Once you're there, the images are variable in quality, with many portions of pages overexposed. (In some cases you may want to transcribe from the image rather than print it out.) Many pages are missing at least one line at the bottom. I have usually found FamilySearch's deed images from other states to be of better quality.

All this said, this degree of online access is better to have than not to have. Kane County is a suburban county west of Chicago, and I'm in a suburban county southeast of Chicago. Even living that close it's cheaper to work the deeds this way than in person. And the more people who can use this option, the better the old deeds are saved from extra handling.

** The grantee and grantor indexes are each arranged under one of many supposed 19th-century improvements on the alphabetical-by-first-letter-of-surname-and-then-chronological default system. First, surnames are organized in the following 47 initial-letter-equivalent groups, each beginning with a certain number, as follows:

A 1, Ba 14, Be 27, Br 40, B 53, Ca 66, Co 79, C 92, D 105, E 118, F 131, Gr 144, G 157, Ha 170, Ho 183, H 196, I 209, J 210, K 223, L 236, Ma 249, Mo 262, M 275, Mc 288, N 301, O 314, P 327, Q 340, Ro 341, R 354, Sc 367, Sh 380, Sm 393, St 406, S 419, T 432, U 445, Va 446, Ve 447, V 448, Wa 449, Wh 462, Wi 475, W 488, Young 501, Y 502, Z 503.


Within each surname initial-letter-equivalent, given names are organized according to 13 different initial letter equivalent groups: AB, C, DE, FG, HI, Ja, Jo, J, KL, MN, OPQR, STUV, and WXYZ.

Note that in this system surnames are not in alphabetical order: Grommet will appear ahead of Garofalo because their initial-letter-equivalent groups are in that order. And within each surname letter-equivalent-group, the names are organized by given names.

I looked for Levi Goodrich in the earliest grantee index, beginning in 1837.  Since his surname starts with G (page 157), given names beginning with "L" will be found at the ninth given-name initial letter equivalent group, so 165. (One big advantage of Kane County's system is that its image numbers correspond to the original page numbers, at least where I looked.) On 165 I found an L. D. Goodrich buying property, referring to a deed at volume 35, page 511. Before going to the deed, I carefully scrolled to the bottom of the page and found that this listing was continued on page 130, where I checked for any more.

OK, he turned out to be Lewis D. Goodrich, not Levi, but those are the breaks. Good luck and good hunting!

Note: As I have learned from Michael Hait's on-line state resources book, DeKalb County has what appears to be a similar setup (in beta test and requiring login) which I have not examined in detail.


Harold Henderson, "Pretty good news for Kane County, Illinois, land researchers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Letters from Illinois to England 1850

More than a quarter of the current 64-page Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly is given over to letters describing northern Illinois as of 160 years ago. "The Letters of John Wightwick of Tenterden, Kent, England and St. Charles, Kane County, Illinois," was contributed by descendant Lillian S. DeHart of New York.

Part of the family emigrated in 1850; the eight letters were mostly written in that year but extend up to 1853 when some of the family were in Chicago. The writers exchanged family information, Methodist exhortations, descriptions of American life, and pleas for loans so that they could not only purchase land but get a house and fence on it. The Americans, John commented 10 August 1850,

generally have three meals a day, animal food at every meal. They seldom have anything cold, Their stoves are exceedingly hand and convenient. Can bake bread or cakes in a very short time, fit for the table in an hour for instance. As the farmers keep cows and poultry there are many eggs, custard pudding, cream etc. etc., ice cream etc. . . . As this part of Illinois is an infant state there is not much fruit at present. The trees are all young, . . . They do not farm very well. They do not plough their ground very well, plough only about 3 or 4 inches in general and harrow very little so their land is very rough . . . they will find they must manage their land instead of throwing it away instead.

Clearly just transcribing the letters was a labor of love, as they were written cross-hatch style first across the paper and then up and down over the previous writing. Annotations are sparse.

The whole business of publishing old letters tends to be a bit random, and this reader would have appreciated more annotations as to who was speaking to whom in the family, and any other Illinois and England context that was known. But as I know from working in this genre, that is a pit as bottomless as genealogy itself!

Those of us with less articulate English ancestors in the Midwest at this date will greatly appreciate this glimpse of how the Wightwicks saw their new home. Join ISGS and get your copy of the whole thing!


Lillian S. DeHart, comp., "The Letters of John Wightwick of Tenterden, Kent, England and St. Charles, Kane County, Illinois," Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 13-30, 48.

Harold Henderson, “Letters from Illinois to England 1850,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific article if you mention this post online.]

Illinois Summer Quarterly

A striking cover photo highlights the main feature and makes the summer issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly stand out.

"The Coles County Poor Farm Cemetery," by Sally M. Smith. "I discovered that, yes, the cemetery is there, but you can't get to it. It's overgrown with weeds and the only way in is to go through the police gun range on the Coffey farm."*

"The Association of Graveyard Rabbits," by Julie Cahill Tarr. (Currently there are five.)

"Bingham-Gracey-McGahey Family Letters," transcribed and annotated by Phyllis J. Bauer. Includes pictures and a genealogical summary.*

"Confessions of an Eclectic Researcher," by James E. Byrne.

"Schwemm Families: Connecting the Dots," by Patricia S. Schultz.

"Can You Find St. Charles in 1865?" by Harold Henderson (that's me). Unraveling Ancestry.com's faulty indexing of that year's state census in Kane County.*

"Ask the Retoucher!" by Eric Curtis M. Basir

"Faces from the Past: Identifying Photos with Marge Rice."

"Family Bible Collections," tr. Kristy Lawrie Gravlin. Conklin, Patten, Lawhorn/Hill, Cassingham, Brown, Hampton/Conley, and Crawley family Bible records, which will eventually go into ISGS's third volume of this nature.

*footnoted.

You wish your ancestors stopped in Kane County, Illinois

This northern Illinois county, now a cluster of Chicago suburbs, is the only county I know where the county recorder has put its tract books on line. Tract books, in case you slept through that part of genealogy class, are property records organized by a particular tract of land. Not all counties have 'em, at least not back to the beginning.

Kane County's tract books consist of typed abstracts of property transactions -- to research the actual deeds you have to go there. And they're not indexed by name, so you need either to be really lucky (not me) or know exactly where your ancestor was (more specifically than just the township!). So it may or may not substitute for (or prepare for) a trip to the courthouse.

That's the beauty of property records -- they weren't created with us genealogists in mind. That's also the horror of them -- they weren't created with us in mind. Now, what I'd really like is to see the grantor-grantee indexes digitized!

Illinois' fall quarterly

I'm looking forward to catching up with this issue, which arrived during my hiatus. A lot of material here, including some from my home county!

Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly 40(3), Fall 2008

"Personal Journals, Diaries, and Old Letters in Genealogical Research," by Bryan L. Mulcahy

"Confessions of a Puzzled Genealogist," by Oriene Morrow Springstroh

"Joseph Bigham, Jr. -- His Remembrances of the Bigham Family History," tr. Phyllis J. (Bigham) Bauer. (Montgomery County) "As soon as I could make letters I had to jot down on paper fathers accounts as he could neither Read or write."

"Richard F. Sutton's Story: A Revolutionary War Soldier -- Part 2," by Raleigh Sutton

"Faces from the Past -- Identifying Photos with Marge Rice"

"Sarah S. (Miner) Boyd," by Mark A. Miner (Fulton County)

"West Aurora [Kane County] School District finds lists of earlier graduates...," from the Aurora Beacon News

"Gravestone Recording: How to Conduct a Project -- how to Use the Data," by John E. Sterling

"Ask the Retoucher!" by Eric Curtis M. Basier

"1864 Award Winners at the Kendall County, Illinois Fair" [just in case you missed it the first time]

Northeastern Illinois county histories...

...digitized by Illinois Harvest recently. These are what we now call the "collar counties" of Chicago:

Portrait and Biographical Album of Will County, Illinois... (Chicago: Chapman Bros., 1890). 771 pages.

Genealogical and Biographical Record of Will County, Illinois... (Chicago: Biographical Publishing Co., 1900). 628 pages.

History of Kendall County, Illinois, from the Earliest Discoveries to the Present Time (Aurora: Knickerbocker & Hodder, 1877), by Edmund Warne Hicks. 438 pages. Any ancestors of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert in here?

History of Kane County, Ill., Volumes 1 and 2, by R. Waite Joslyn (Chicago: The Pioneer Pub. Co., 1908).

History of McHenry County, Ill., Volumes 1 and 2 (Chicago: Munsell Pub. Co., 1922).