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.

Tour the Pacific of 200 years ago in the April NYGBR

I shouldn't have been surprised -- but I was when I opened the April 2013 New York Genealogical and Biographical Record and found myself plunged into a series of trading voyages around and across the Pacific Ocean in the early 1800s, in the first installment of Edward E. Steele's lead article on Capt. William J. Pigot. Pigot and his family were New Yorkers all right, but he at least did not stay put. Steele combined a great story with great genealogy detective work to make sure the right story was being told about the right people.

(Those who read Steele's article will understand why this is the first genealogy article I ever read that brought to mind John Updike's early story, "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island," in Pigeon Feathers; now also in The New Yorker's subscriber-only online archive for 13 January 1962.)

More conventionally, I was pleased to find a crop of Midwesterners in the first installment of George R. Nye's account of the Preserved Fish Deuel family, with locations including Minnesota (Cottonwood, Faribault, McLeod, Brown, and Ramsey counties), Illinois (Lake County), Wisconsin (Waushara, Marquette, and Green Lake counties), and Iowa (Wright, Kossuth, and Osceola counties).

It's not a slam on the article to say that I enjoyed the footnotes just as much. As the author notes, the article "demonstrates the types of sources and analysis that can be used to document a family" even when vital records are few and far between. Among the alternatives employed were the hybrid township-military records created by many New York town clerks during the Civil War, documenting not only the service but genealogically relevant facts about soldiers from their area.

East-central Ohio (Coshocton, Licking, and Fairfield counties) also was a landing place for one descendant of the Pine-Pettit-Dorlon connection documented in the concluding part of Robert J. Meyers' account.




Edward E. Steele, "William J. Pigot, Captain of the Forester," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 85-100.

George R. Nye, "Children and Grandchildren of Preserved Fish7 Deuel of Cambridge and Massena, New York," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 123-39.

Robert J. Meyers, "A Pine-Pettit-Dorlon Connection: Untangling the Family of Elias D. Pine (1793-1866) of Hempstead, Long Island, New York (concluded)," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 140-54.



Harold Henderson, "Tour the Pacific of 200 years ago in the April NYGBR," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

Moderately Recent Blog Posts I Have Enjoyed #2

Diana Dretske at Illuminating Lake County History posted a detailed appreciation of John Easton's 1844-1846 store ledger from the hamlet of Half Day. I became acquainted with the ledger's transcription when I had a research interest in the immediate area; I was unaware of its near-obliteration when the purchasers of Easton's property later used it as a scrapbook in which to post newspaper clippings! Good reading and images both for people interested in Lake County, Illinois, or in the enormous potential of this under-used resource.

The indefatigable Judy Russell at The Legal Genealogist asks the key question of relevant Ancestry.com officials. She doesn't put it this way, but I will: Since Ancestry's advertising often does not encourage genealogical education, and since it hosts many erroneous trees, how can the company hope to make clear the limitations of its new autosomal DNA test when test results are being connected to those same erroneous trees? Is this anything more than the 21st-century version of pasting scrapbook items onto a potentially valuable genealogy resource and just making everyone more confused than before? If you think I'm over the top on this, Judy is more judicious than I and has done her homework. Read her post and draw your own conclusions.

In an earlier post I uncritically repeated Ancestry.com's statement at Wednesday night's NGS conference reception that the company has 10 billion records. James Tanner at Genealogy's Star does some badly needed investigation and finds this kind of claim to be more promotional than informational.

Please note: I am a long-time and continuing subscriber to Ancestry and have benefited enormously from its work. But it should be possible to earn a profit and educate the public at the same time, and I believe that genealogists in general (and professionals and bloggers in particular) have a role to play in encouraging its executives to keep both objectives clearly in view.


Harold Henderson, "Moderately Recent Blog Posts I Have Enjoyed #2" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Real meetings and virtual genealogy

Successful corporations like Southwest Airlines say it; moribund dinosaurs like Sears say it too, because it's true: "Thank you for choosing us. We know you have many choices."

The same is true in genealogy. Genealogy meetings have lower attendance now than they did ten or twenty years ago. Partly it's because many genealogists wrongly believe they can find everything worth finding about their families on line. Partly it's because many genealogy societies proceed much as if it were still 1989 -- or 1949! -- and wonder why their attendance is dwindling.

But I'm not here to whine about that. People have more choices now than they did then -- deal with it!

Recently my wife was peripherally involved in a local church fund-raising event tied to the centennial of the 1912 Titanic disaster. (That whole craze gave me the creeps, but I'm not here to whine about that either.) The church in question is a diminished congregation chained to a massive century-old edifice in need of equally massive renovation. Many free events had generated little help. In this case, they held a 1912-costume ball with thematically appropriate music and asked the attendees to (a) dress up in period style and (b) fork over $45.

An hour before it opened there was line of well-dressed chatty people out into the street!

Morals for us: (1) Insofar as possible, cater to what people really want. It may not be brain surgery, but our local society tripled our usual attendance with a 1940 census program. (2) And consider having a party and charging more for it!

As to the Titanic angle, I especially admire Lake County Historian Diana Dretske's post on the subject for responding to the public craze and still tying it to real genealogy.



Diana Dretske, "Titanic's Lake County Passengers," 12 April 2012, Illuminating Lake County History, Lake County Discovery Museum (http://lakecountyhistory.blogspot.com : accessed 23 April 2012).


Harold Henderson, “Real meetings and virtual genealogy” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you mention it on line.]

Illinois Spring 2009 Quarterly

Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly 41(1), Spring 2009

Margaret J. Collins and Daniel W. Dixon, "The Inventive McWorters of New Philadelphia, Illinois: Patents as a Genealogical Resource" -- some amazing drawings from Pike County African-American inventors of a century ago, plus a wakeup call about the existence of the Illinois State Library's Patent and Trademark Depository Library.

Mary Manning, "The Robert R. McCormick Research Center: Military Records and More," located at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, DuPage County.

Ann Wells, "Military Monument in Union Cemetery," Crystal Lake, Lake County.

Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, "Military Separation Papers as Record Source" -- although no longer a public record.

"Faces from the Past -- Identifying Photos with Marge Rice." A gallery of identified but as yet unclaimed images, 1895-1910.

Oriene Morrow Springstroh, "Aurora Historical Society: An Overview of Its Genealogical Resource Holdings."

Kristy Lawrence Gravlin, contr., "Family Bible Collection" -- Chapman, Crampton, Jones, Butler, Moulton, Ordway, and associates.

Oriene Morrow Springstroh, "Confessions of a Grateful Genealogist" -- including details of an 1855 Henry County estate sale.

"New Genealogical Publications at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library for 9 August-15 November 2008"

"Illinois Newspapers Available on Interlibrary Loan"

Waukegan's Sesquicentennial?

Evidently this is going to be Catching Up With Fellow Midwestern Bloggers week. Diana Dretske at the Lake County (Illinois) Museum and Archives posted on Lake County seat Waukegan's 150th anniversary as a city. Of course its actual age as an identifiable place goes back at least to 1695. Her Illuminating Lake County, Illinois History blog is consistently festooned with wonderful images from that history.

Lake County's workshop-not-to-be-missed

Lake County (the Illinois one, squeezed between Chicago and Wisconsin) is sponsoring what looks to be its 15th annual November workshop on Saturday the 8th. The speakers are Certified Genealogists Tom Jones and David McDonald. If you know them, you know this is a must-attend. If you don't, then I'm telling you. All the details including exact location, hours, and program topics, are in this PDF brochure and registration form.

Illuminating Lake County Illinois History

That's a new more-or-less-twice-a-week blog by Diana Dretske in her capacity as collections coordinator for the Lake County, Illinois, history archives outside Wauconda: Illuminating Lake County, Illinois History. Like its neighbor the colorful Lake County Discovery Museum and its virtual neighbor the Curt Teich Postcard Archives, the archives are under the umbrella of the Lake County Forest Preserves.

My research lately has kept me coming back to Lake County (which FYI is in the extreme upper-right-hand corner of Illinois, squeezed between Chicago and Wisconsin and fronting on Lake Michigan), so I may be biased or just zoned out from too many two-hour commutes across the Chicago metropolitan area, but I found the material quite interesting.

Recent history posts include looks back at JFK's 1960 campaign swing through the county; Swan School in Fremont Township, a sample of the archives' holdings of material on 52 local schools, most now gone; the North Shore Line; and one of Lake County's funnier products, Jack Benny of Waukegan.

Genealogists with young descendants to entertain can make strategic simultaneous use of the museum and archives (not to mention the beautiful forest preserve grounds). As with any archive, do your homework and call ahead to arrange a productive visit.

What NEHGS Knows That You Don't

The New England Historical and Genealogical Society is making major moves into New York research, and extending little pseudopods even farther west. Here are Midwestern resources highlighted by Valerie Beaudrault in recent issues of their email newsletter:

Hamilton County, Ohio, Genealogical Society -- that's Cincinnati and suburbs to ordinary folks -- with online Cincinnati Newspaper Obituary Index (seven newspapers, some in German) and Cincinnati Marriage Indexes from several sources. The society also offers a transcription of the 1894 History of Cincinnati and Hamilton Co. Ohio.

Cook Memorial Public Library District in Libertyville, Lake County, Illinois (confusingly, the county just north of Cook County), with a local newspaper obituary index from 1894, and images of local telephone books from 1913 and most years 1924-1959. The library also has an online genealogy newsletter, and if you go there, offers access to the premier resource for original records from Sweden, Genline.

Winneconne Cemetery, Winnecone, Winnebago County, Wisconsin, with online indexes by name and section, and a cemetery map.

More Third Coast genealogy

In the April-June issue of NGS Newsmagazine, Debra Mieszala, CG, of Lake County, Illinois, describes records of the Coast Guard predecessor United States Life-Saving Service (USLSS), begun in the 1870s. If you have a research target involved, these records are a treat -- everything from logbooks to correspondence to "articles of engagement." And check out the list of articles for further study.

Local News from the Past

Like many libraries, Fremont Public Library in north suburban Mundelein (Lake County), Illinois, has a symbiotic relationship with the county genealogical society. The Lake County Genealogical Society's Research Facility (AKA the genealogy room) is on its second floor, and Fremont's web site lists and distinguishes three different Lake County genealogy web sites.

For the past ten years (apparently), Fremont has done something else so simple and so valuable that I can't believe it's the only one. Under the heading, "Local News from the Past," they've posted the "local" items from the weekly Lake County Independent from a century earlier -- 1 Jan 1897 through 23 Aug 1907, and I hope they haven't given it up now!

This listing was an enormous help in sorting and following my Burdick, Knigge, Aynsley families in the area -- like watching a movie unfold, sometimes plotless and sometimes with a plot you know the end of, as relatives gather around a sickbed.

Quite a few basic genealogy sources are like this. Preparing them week after week won't get you published or win any ingenuity rewards in the prestigious journals, but without them it would be just that much more difficult to have the resources to be ingenious with.