Front-page news 101 years ago, or "we're not in Kansas any more"

FIRST AIRPLANE PASSES OVER WILLIAMSBURG

A large airplane coming from the southwest and going northeast passed over Williamsburg about 4:30 Saturday afternoon [30 November 1918]. This is the first airplane which has been near here, and people in and around the vicinity were able to get a good view of it, as it was going rather slowly. No report has been seen of it, so no one know why it was traveling over here.

(Williamsburg Star [Kansas], Thursday 5 December 1918, page 1, column 2)

Canoes, Kansas farmers, and the infinity of genealogy

Some folks argue that genealogy is limited because there are only so many records, only so much information to be found about the past; unlike people working in the experimental sciences, we can't create new data by conducting experiments.

I don't buy it, for two reasons:

One, this opinion rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of genealogy. Even if information about the past is finite, there is no limit to the available evidence about the past, because there is no limit to the number of ideas people can have. New evidence is not just found by finding new records or new information. Evidence is also discovered is by seeing the same old information in a new light. (And yes, this subject will come up in Kimberly Powell's and my course in January at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy.)

Two, there is more information out there than I can imagine, even after taking into account that there is more than I can imagine. Two from today:

(1) Kansas State University librarians are digitizing old agriculture magazines like crazy, benefiting from grants in the thousands, not millions. To be available in 2015 are Kansas Farmer (1863-1954), and after that Kansas 4‐H Journal (1955-1988), Kansas Future Farmer (1929-1979), and five additional newsletters and magazines.  (Hat tip to ResearchBuzz.) I believe it would be professional malpractice if I failed to disclose that one of the librarians involved is surnamed Farmer.

(2) What did your ancestor do at the canoe factory? If he (she?) worked at Old Town Canoe Company in Maine during much of the 20th century, you may be able to see when his hands touched a particular canoe keel. Check out these "canoe build sheets" and the associated discussion forum.



Harold Henderson, "Canoes, Kansas farmers, and the infinity of genealogy," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 August 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

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.]

Smart Genealogy in LaGrange County, Indiana

The Midwest has a cameo in the current National Genealogical Society Quarterly, in Arlene V. Jennings's masterful article on the Yorkshire origins of Hanna (Watson) Smart. Most of the research action takes place in England, as the author matches up the Indiana and Yorkshire families almost as quickly (and a good deal more cogently) as a certain TV show. Then things get interesting, because Hannah Watson had no baptismal record in the village of North Newbald, where she was married.

In one of those laconic sentences that represents countless hours of work, the author observes that "of eighty-six parishes within a twelve-mile radius of North Newbald, candidates for Hannah appear in four parishes." (There's even a citation to a local demographic study justifying the choice of that size radius.)

Using clues provided by siblings, Hannah's parents are identified, but her father is William Watson, a common name in the area. Eight of the article's twenty pages are devoted to sorting out William Watsons in the area, using land tax assessments, churchwardens' accounts, poor rates, manorial records, maps, probate records, and censuses. These records provide an amazing level of detail about where Hannah's parents lived (near a boundary, of course) and where her parents had lived before their marriage. The genealogical summary shows Hannah's children ending up not only in LaGrange County, Indiana, but in St. Joseph County Michigan; Steuben County, Indiana; and Osage and Marion counties, Kansas.



Arlene V. Jennings, CG, "The Yorkshire Origins of Hannah (Watson) Smart of LaGrange County, Indiana," National Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 100, no. 3 (September 2012):199-219


Harold Henderson, "Smart Genealogy in LaGrange County, Indiana," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Lidie Harkness Newton, an appreciation (possibly off topic)

Last week I grabbed a 50-cent used paperback from our local library's perpetual-book-sale rack, just because I had enjoyed something else the author (Jane Smiley) had written. It never occurred to me that this fiction would anything more than a pleasant escape. But sometimes fiction can get us closer to the human side of history than non-fiction can.

Set in the 1850s in Illinois and Kansas and Missouri, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton begins as a coming-of-age story and a bit of a love story -- and then everything changes. Both the heroine-narrator and the reader find themselves suddenly in deep water. Not until I finished it did I realize the Lidie was a bit like Voltaire's Candide in that picaresque tale. But unlike Candide she's a very real person as well as a vehicle for the author.

Smiley's lesson is a good deal more subtle than Voltaire's. In my mind, few issues in all of history, and none in American history, are more clear-cut than the fathomless moral evil that was human slavery and its ongoing aftermath. Smiley sets her story in the middle of a boiling conflict over slavery, and uses Lidie's adventures to show the human faces of an "issue" and compel the reader to pay a different kind of attention. No, she didn't change my mind, and I don't think she meant to. It's more about what you do with your assurance, maybe, or . . .

Actually, maybe we can't even have this conversation until you've read the book too.



Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (New York: Knopf, 1998).


Harold Henderson, "Lidie Harkness Newton, an appreciation," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 May 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).

Kansas Sanborn Maps!

If you have Kansas people and have yet to discover what a window on the past Sanborn fire-insurance maps can be, you do have a treat coming! The KU library has put up 5,245 full-color map sheets, free on-line, from Abilene 1884 to Yates Spring 1912. Enjoy!

More information about on-line availabilities at my earlier posts on the subject -- just search on "Sanborn."

Hat tip: Internet Scout Project

Kansas on-line indexes

Even the on-line world is turning to materials a bit beyond the usual vital records in the usual vital places. These happen to be in Kansas, a frequent destination point for dwellers in the "old Midwest." Doctors' licenses, fraternal order notices, letters from home, and more, searchable thanks to the Kansas State Historical Society. Don't give up on your Kansas research target without checking these.

Hat tip to ProGenealogists, maybe the most hard-core genealogy blog out there, for the initial tip.

Midwest in NGSQ

The 2009 winner of the National Genealogical Society's writing contest, Kay Haviland Freilich, CG, systematically checks out her ancestor's three-page life story and finds it mostly accurate in the December issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly: "Verifying the Autobiography of Mary (Seeds) Haviland." The family moved back and forth in a dizzying fashion, starting and ending in eastern Pennsylvania, but in the meantime frequenting Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, and southern California.

As NGSQ articles go this is a relaxing read in that there are no mind-bending methodologies or convoluted problems of identity. I learned that I had better never assume that when anybody moves, they move west! A nice touch is the agricultural information for the Paschal Seeds family from the 1885 Kansas state census; I would love to have seen how the Seeds family's farm (including a significant orchard) compared to their neighbors'.

Ohio summer quarterly

Contents of the Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly for Summer 2009 (volume 49, number 2, if you're counting). If you can't find something to your taste in this varied issue, maybe you need a tastebud transplant!

"Locating Kingdom of Hannover Records for 19th Century German Immigrants in Ohio," by Verna Forbes Willson -- first prize winner in this year's OGS writing contest: "My first and often repeated advice to other researchers is to not put too much faith in what others have told you but try as hard as possible to find the truth and preserve it."

"2008 First Families of Ohio Roster," by Karen Miller Bennett, CG(SM)

"The Reverend Henry Miller Herman," by Kathryn Young Ellis

"1904 Deaths in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Burials Outside of Hamilton County," tr. Kenny R. Burck and Doris Thomson

"Mining for Historical and Genealogical Gems," by Patricia Donaldson-Mills, with an extended transcript from an 1831 Brown County case, James Taylor vs. Duncan McArthur, including depositions from surveyors in the area in the 1790s.

"Elizabeth Scranton," obituary transcribed from the Alliance Review by Lois Adams Bender

"Ohioans on the Move: Portrait and Biographical Album, Sedgwick County, Kansas, Part 2," tr. Dan Spellman

"Lemuel C. Scholfield, Debtor or Deadbeat?" by Mari M. McLean *

"Yearbooks and Reunion Books: Genealogical Windfalls from Former Veterans' Societies," by Eric Johnson

"A Monthly Time Book, Wabash and Erie Canal, 1838-1840," tr. Terri Gorney

"Identification of an Old Soldier: Ira B. Sawyer," by Sandra Sawyer Lawrence: "Ira's story was
so intriguing I sent for his Civil War pension records.... What a surprise I had when I received nearly a ream of paper from the National Archives," most of it about Ora, "a woman I knew nothing about."

* Footnoted.

112 pages, including about 29 pages of written text (stories or articles) as opposed to transcriptions and lists.

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.

Welcome new bloggers

Blogging -- easy to start, hard to keep going. Here are two new genealogy blogs (from friends) that look like keepers:

(1) Sheri Fenley's The Educated Genealogist (began in August). If you've been on the APG or Transitional Genealogists mailing list and read her thigh-slapping account of her first time at Samford, she needs no introduction. If you haven't, then just close this window right now and go to the archives. She's from California but has Kansas roots, and that's enough of an excuse for me to put her on here. In the department of learning stuff, she recently posted about a contradiction between a cemetery stone and a census -- either a certain ancestor returned from the dead, or one of these records is in error!

(2) Kathy Brady-Blake's Kathy's Genealogy Blog (began in October). Kathy's a Certified Genealogist, and for I don't know how long BCG had her portfolio up for us aspirants to read as an example. Does that take guts or what? She's from Illinois with an interest in Chicago -- as well she should, since one of her ancestors went back into the teeth of the Great Fire to make sure his soon-to-be-incinerated front door was locked!

Both Sheri and Kathy use a lot of photos, tell about their own research, and participate in tagging games and blogging carnivals -- so if you find it boring over here, they may be more your style. I'm adding them both to my Protopage home page so I can keep up. Go and do likewise.

Land Records

Are you one of the many genealogists who search far and wide for vital records, but fight shy of land records? Two recent online items may encourage you to take the leap into some of the oldest and most easily accessible sources of evidence on ancestors:

* A new blog -- you never know if these things are going to stick around -- called In Deeds is an ongoing series of land research chronicles from Michigan, with sidelights on George Armstrong Custer.

* The Family History Bulletin at WorldVitalRecords.com reprints from Everton's Genealogical Helper a Republic County, Kansas, study by Mary Clement Douglass, CG. Using the tract book or numerical index to follow a particular parcel of land in Republic County, she shows how she traced a family "through 4 generations and throughout the United States. It has given us legal name changes, clues to marriages, death dates, locations to pursue probate cases for deceased members, and evidence of the family scattering in the Twentieth Century across America. All of this information was found in less than two hours in the Republic County Register of Deeds office." Go for it.

(And if you have research targets in Kansas, take a look at her brand-new book on Kansas research.)

"Contrary Mary"

New blogger and veteran professional, Kansas genealogist Mary Clement Douglass, CG, offers what has to be the world's simplest format for a research plan at Notes That Matter.

Where did they go? More maps -- Kansas

The episodic blog from the Kansas Council of Genealogical Societies links to a nice set of maps of county formation in the state. Too cool.

When conference blogs go good

Blogs designed to promote an institution or an event tend to lack character IMHO. So I'm especially happy to report that the NGS conference blog for their big Kansas City event May 14-17 just posted more than a dozen crackerjack ideas, locations, and links for conducting Kansas and Missouri research nearby.

I have my eyes on Swiss immigrant David Joss in Buchanan County, Missouri (my gg grandfather's brother) and Stephen Cooper in "Bleeding Kansas" (my great-grandfather's first cousin). And there are others. But frankly the conference itself looks so full of learning opportunities that I don't know when I'll find time or energy to hit the repositories. Which courthouses will be open 24-7 that week?