Local Laws in Indiana on line, a sampling

We think of laws as general and impersonal, but legislatures also pass "private" or "local" laws directed to individuals or localities -- sometimes fairly routine, sometimes to redress injustices. These private laws were more common in earlier days and in Indiana are preserved in books published for each session of the General Assembly. Some are on line, some not -- but in either case the titling and cataloging are irregular. Many libraries catalog them as serials. Since the legislature began meeting in December and carried over into the next year, dating can be an issue. GoogleBooks makes its online copies rather hard to find. I have located six years there, 1843-1847 and 1850.

La Porte County, Indiana, is mentioned 30 times in these six books, an average of five items per year. They included:

* a few divorces,

* a few cases of aliens who owned and sold land,

* several incorporations of local institutions and businesses, usually naming the directors,

* some road authorizations with names of commissioners and directions (“on as straight a line as the nature of the ground will admit of”), and

* some routine, or just plain weird. I'm still scratching my head over the county commissioners' being authorized "to make John Johnson, of said county, the same allowance for the arrest of a horse thief, calling himself John Johnson, as they might have made if said horse thief had been convicted of said crime.”

Full details and access instructions if you get stuck are over at Midwest Roots.

In addition to looking for particular people, these books can be used as a kind of on-the-scene history, a bit like the "annuals" that encyclopedias used to publish. Names of businesses and institutions changed over time, and often the hardest part of researching people connected with them is figuring out what they were called at the time. So it may be helpful to know that in 1846 the legislature amended the charter of La Porte University so that its medical school would be known as Indiana Medical College. Those institutions are long gone but they were significant in early Midwest medical education.

Local histories tend to focus on those enterprises and individuals that succeeded and stuck around; the lawmakers didn't know the future, so this is a place to look for a "clay turnpike company," plank roads, and off-brand railroads that may have never run a train. History is often written by the winners; genealogy is written by everybody.


ADDED TUESDAY MORNING 31 July:
Two useful sets of information from this source in Indiana have been extracted, indexed, and published:

Malinda E. E. Newhard, Name Changes Granted by the Indiana General Assembly Prior to 1852 (Harlan, IN: author, 1981)

Malinda E. E. Newhard, Divorces Granted by the Indiana General Assembly Prior to 1852 (Harlan, IN: author, 1981). Note that in some cases the General Assembly actually granted the divorce, and in others it authorized the filing of a court case locally.

Newhard cited General Laws 1817-1851, Local Laws 1835-1851, and Special Laws 1818, 1824, and 1831.

Plank road scrip illustration from Sellitstore (http://sellitstore.ecrater.com/p/9628689/michigan-city-union-plank-road# : accessed 28 July 2012), where the bill once said to be worth $5 was for sale for $125.

Harold Henderson, "Local Laws in Indiana on line, a sampling," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mostly Midwestern genealogy finds on and off the web

* The summer issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly includes a well-cited article by Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five Ferguson Brothers from Scotland."A bonus for me: ISGSQ is using footnotes instead of the dreaded endnotes.


* As usual, the Ohio Genealogy News is packed with instructional articles of interest. For Summer 2012, I particularly enjoyed:

Chris Staats' "Deed Anatomy 101" with a clever graphic;

Joyce Quigley's "Online Cemetery Research" (interment records!); and

Delores Jones's "My Last Name is Jones (Success with a Common Surname)": "The only way I found my Jones family in the 1930 U.S. census for Mississippi was by reading my late aunt's papers again."


* Whenever you're in a law library, take the opportunity to snoop around. During IGHR at Samford, some sharp-eyed Pennsylvania researchers found an unlikely treasure: county-level court case reports for several counties in Pennsylvania, mostly from the 20th century. Who knew?


* Joe Beine has updated his wonderful index to on-line indexes of death records of various kinds, including indexes for ten Midwestern counties:

in Illinois -- DeKalb, McDonough, Sangamon, and Will;

in Michigan -- Menominee, Oakland, and Wayne;

in Ohio -- Montgomery; and

in Wisconsin -- Barron and Eau Claire.





Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five Ferguson Brothers from Scotland,"Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 74-91.

Ohio Genealogy News, vol 43, no. 2 (Summer 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Midwestern genealogy finds on and off the web," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

NGS Day Three (Friday the 11th)

At this stage of a national conference, many of us are operating like the elevator we tried to ride down in our hotel this morning: arriving at the 3rd floor, it announced the 1st floor, but never actually reached the first floor (we got out and took the escalators). Like that elevator, we're still in action, but not necessarily functioning on all cylinders due to information and sociability overloads.

My talk on the Indianapolis Orphan Asylum and its records was cordially received. It was part of an all-day same-room Indiana track, beginning with Dave McDonald on Indiana history and settlement patterns, and ending with Michael Lacopo on tips and advice in hard-core research in the state. His tour of courthouse records was very informative, especially the figures that less than 5% of 19th-century Hoosiers left wills, and perhaps four times that number had probates. "You can never have too many records."

For me as spectator Friday was Law Day. Michael LeClerc gave a virtuoso performance on Advanced Probate, minus his slides which had just been eaten by Dropbox. Two of many points to remember: read Inheritance in America, and be aware that when an estate has to be re-administered or is contested, the case may go direct to the appellate court without any obvious signals in the regular probate records.

After lunch Debra Mieszala gave the most fact-packed lecture I have yet had a chance to hear this week, on taking the "awww" out of the law library. I am looking forward to upgrading my legal knowledge and application. Knowing the difference between slip laws, session laws, code books, and annotated statutes will definitely help. (They're all good, but in different ways.)

The evening was spent in many pleasant conversations in the Hyatt lobby, the NGSQ centennial reception, and the ProGen Study Group dinner. Tomorrow is the last day of a conference that on Tuesday seemed like it would last forever.


Harold Henderson, "NGS Day Three (Friday the 11th)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Common Law in Colonial America

I picked up a copy of William E. Nelson's slim volume, The Common Law in Colonial America, volume 1, The Cheseapeake and New England, 1607-1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), at an online Oxford University Press sale.

It's of interest to those trying to track the role of common law in American laws. I also found it an interesting quick overview of the New England and Chesapeake colonial societies, how different they were, and how they both used the English common law in shaping their different legal traditions. Virginia and New England remain interestingly different places even after centuries of change and homogenization.

Here's a taste from the introduction:

As it functioned after 1625 in Virginia, the rule of law mattered not because the law had a particular content, but because its content was known, fixed, and not subject to arbitrary change [allowing lenders to count on being able to collect debts]. In contrast, the content of the law mattered enormously in colonial New England, where . . . a key issue was the discretion of magistrates. The magistrates wanted to rule by the law of God, but most of the people in the towns found God's law too ambiguous. {9}

ALL the laws of Illinois

Do you need to know what the divorce law was in Illinois in 1851? 1887? Western Illinois University and the Illinois State Library have digitized a great many of the publications of the Laws of Illinois going back to the beginning of statehood, and including private laws (such as provision made for the case of Edward Mlodzianowski, a Polish exile who died intestate in Morgan County 8 October 1840). There's genealogical gold here.

Hat tip to Research Buzz and the Rinn Law Library blog.

A different take on 19th-century law

On H-Net, Timothy S. Huebner reviews Laura F. Edwards's new book The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South,
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The book is based on micro-research in six counties in North and South Carolina. This passage from the review caught my attention, and it wouldn't surprise me if something similar were true in other regions, especially near the frontier:

Courts developed around magistrates in order to deal with more serious
offenses, but Edwards convincingly shows that in the final analysis
the people wielded considerable power within this system.  Possessing
a deep sense of their responsibility to the community, as well as a
basic understanding of local legal processes, men and women--whether
black or white, rich or poor--routinely brought complaints against
others for breaching the peace.  Such complaints empowered individuals
at the same time that they preserved existing hierarchy.  "Local
officials considered complaints on a case-by-case basis, righting
specific wrongs done to the metaphorical public body without extending
additional rights to any category of dependents," Edwards explains (p.
110).  Thus, local officials responding to complaints could "undercut
the domestic authority of one husband or one master" without making
any generalized rule that affected husbands or masters (p. 110).

I haven't met up with the book itself yet, but I hope to soon.

Eavesdrop on the lawyers

Texas-based researcher Debbie Parker Wayne has a nice list of legal books and resources with genealogists in mind, including some by state (there's something for all five of our focus states). This is more than just a law dictionary, it includes current statutes as well as some histories of pertinent matters like marriage and inheritance laws.

Maybe this post belongs under methodology, as Tom Jones makes a strong case in his lecture "Inferential Genealogy" that you have to know the law in order to interpret the evidence, or even to recognize it as evidence. So in Wayne's phrase, you probably do have "ancestors hidden in the statutes."

Breaking news: Just out from Stanford University Press is Lawrence M. Friedman's Dead Hands: A Social History of Wills, Trusts, and Inheritance Law. I haven't seen it, and the blurbs focus on current hot-button issues -- leaving it open whether he goes back far enough, and deep enough, to interest genealogists. But any book with a title like this has real potential. Hat tip to the Legal History Blog.

Methodology Monday in Indiana Courthouses

Not all evidence analysis takes place after we've found it. In 1981 Indiana State Archivist John J. Newman gave a talk at the state historical society's spring family history symposium. The society still sells the text for $1 as a 16-page pamphlet. How many of today's PowerPoint lectures could be translated into this lasting format, or would hold up as well a generation after they were given?

Newman's unsparing indictment is that "genealogists usually fail to manage their research." His recommendation, from the pre-internet days, is to plan to spend "several hours in your home [county's] law library" in order to save "many more hours in the field." {1, 8}

If, as he suggests, you learn what's in the "order books, entry dockets, issue dockets, appearance dockets, general entry, claim and allowance docket, complete order books, civil pleadings, probate proceedings," and more, then you'll be in a position to ask the clerk "for a location of a record, not where information can be found." And that's a big difference.

Newman, John J. "Research in Indiana Courthouses: Judicial and Other Records." Indianapolis: Indiana State Historical Society [1981]. Includes material from a 1979 presentation on county records as well.

Wisconsin Legal History, anyone?

For references to books, and a large helping of short articles by Joseph A. Ranney, author of the most recent book (Trusting Nothing To Providence), check out Wisconsin Legal History at the Wisconsin state bar page. Nothing here to cut and paste into your Wisconsin family's genealogy, but lots of sources and ideas and background, from roistering circuit riders to angry farmers. Here's a snip from the latter -- read the whole thing:

Another Jacksonian feature of the Wisconsin Constitution was Article VIII, section 10, which prohibited the state from financing or supporting public improvements of any sort. Because state aid was not available, early railroads had to look to private investors and municipalities for the huge sums of capital they needed to build and operate their lines.¹² The Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad developed the device, copied by many other railroads, of issuing stock in return for municipal bonds or individual promissory notes that were secured by mortgages.¹³ A large portion of the notes and mortgages passed into the hands of eastern financiers.¹⁴

The depression of 1857 forced every railroad in Wisconsin into bankruptcy. Most farmers who had purchased railroad stock had relied on railroad dividends to pay their promissory notes; when the dividends dried up, the easterners who held the notes foreclosed on thousands of farms throughout Wisconsin. Farm mortgage leagues were formed to resist the foreclosure threat, and they became a force in state politics. Between 1857 and 1868 the Legislature passed a series of laws giving farm debtors various substantive and procedural defenses in foreclosure actions; however, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down all of the laws, in most cases because they impaired the obligation-of-contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution. Throughout the 1860s the leagues tried to defeat the supreme court justices at the polls and obtain a more sympathetic court, but they failed narrowly at each election.¹⁵

(Hat tip to Legal History Blog.)