Are you an advancing genealogist?

BCG trustee and forensic genealogist Debra Mieszala of Lake County, Illinois, is now posting at The Advancing Genealogist: Genealogy, Experience, and Education. Illinois researchers in particular should check out her posts on statutory law links and indexes.

From where I sit, we can always use more educational blogs with high standards. This one comes with resource links on adoption, a perennially hot topic where people want to learn fast.

What you might not know if you haven't heard her speak is that she does great stories too. A few days ago she had a timely guest post over at Ancestry, profiling a fallen Korean War veteran.



Harold Henderson, "Are you an advancing genealogist?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.

Mid-20th-century war resource

The St. Joseph County (Indiana) Public Library has an on-line "Service Notes" database indexing almost 40,000 newspaper mentions of local people "who were being drafted, entering the service, being promoted or sent to different locations" between 1941 and 1979. It's in two parts, one for WWII, the other for Korea and Vietnam. Each can be browsed if you specify how to sort the list and a particular branch of service. The results will give name and address, but any underlying newspaper items must be retrieved from either microfilm or clipping files in the library in South Bend.

Obviously this sort of database is just a start on research, and equally obviously it won't help if your person of interest came from somewhere else. But check your relevant library -- they may have a similar card file or index that hasn't made it on line yet!