Things Historians Know

 Mitra Sharafi on small archives at the Legal History Blog.

http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/in-praise-of-small-archives.html#more

From the blogs: 14-year-old fathers, on-line yearbooks, 1790 in western Massachusetts, and more

I can't read all the blogs or pick the best posts, but here are some recent items I enjoyed.

* The Plausibility Police! Dawne Slater-Putt at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center was confronted with two different 14-year-old "fathers" in one day of work. Here's how she ascertained the facts in the first case and in the second.

* If you want a publishable research challenge but don't want to get into a lot of writing, check out your own and all your friends' and relations' trees for an under-documented resident of western Massachusetts in 1790 -- and then check out the New England Historic Genealogical Society's project.You will be edited, but that's a good thing!

* On-line yearbooks are getting common, but here's a bouquet from Loyola University (Chicago).

* Get thee to a law library for a legal-history closeup on black people in court in South after the Civil War. "This article draws on more than 600 higher court cases in eight southern states to show that African Americans succeeded in litigating certain kinds of civil cases against white southerners in southern appellate courts between 1865 and 1920." Hat tip to the Legal History Blog.

* Do you worship history? Debunk it? Or use it as a tool to "fluff out" your trees? Here's Diane Haddad's take at Family Tree magazine's blog.



Harold Henderson, "From the blogs: 14-year-old fathers, on-line yearbooks . . .," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Coles County Illinois Court Cases on line

Thanks to the Legal History Blog, I just heard of an online index or database to 19th-century circuit court cases in Coles County, Illinois -- an "ongoing project" whose web site describes as "current" the team from 2002-2003! (The internet has a history -- who knew?)

The index is or was the product of "an on-going investigation by student researchers and history professors at Eastern Illinois University and elsewhere." They're identifying and abstracting (as genealogists would call it) and indexing criminal and civil cases from Coles County from 1830 to 1899. These files are conveniently held by the Illinois Regional Archives Depository at Eastern Illinois University's library. According to the IRAD inventory, its holdings include circuit court case files 1832-1890, chancery files 1835-1900 (seemingly overlapping with the previous), and the chancery record 1849-1915 (these would be the court's bound record books).

The web site also includes several other valuable resources for researchers: maps and history of Coles County (which included current Douglas and Cumberland counties at various times prior to 1859), a list of the five "top" county cases 1830-1900, and samples of court documents (selected from later years when preprinted forms were in use).

The index itself currently includes cases as early as 1831 (which are cited to IRAD files, so sue me) and as late as 1906. Within those years the coverage is quite uneven, ranging from no cases at all for the years of 1879, 1880, and 1890, to over 100 cases for each of 1857, 1858, 1859, and 1865. CCLHP's "results" page essays a few generalizations from it, but genealogists and social historians might want to exercise caution in doing so, since the database is clearly not comprehensive, and there's no way to tell whether it's representative of all the cases in that 70-year period.

For each indexed case you can find the date of the underlying incident; the date the case was filed; the case type; the names, sexes, and literacy statuses of the plaintiffs and defendants; and a one-sentence description of the issues involved.

EIU's IRAD already has a separate and somewhat more terse index of cases heard in Mattoon's short-lived Court of Common Pleas from 1869 to 1873; its records were merged in with the circuit court after that time. But at this point IRAD has no reference pointer to the CCLHP index. You just have to know.

The CCLHP database is intended for "high school students, undergraduates, graduates, genealogists, and professional historians," but while extremely valuable it is not ideal for genealogists, in that (like the Mattoon index) it only indexes plaintiffs and defendants.

In my own work -- outside of probates or partition suits -- when seeking to identify a difficult person I would most want to know who stood up in court to guarantee his bail or payment of a fine, or who he stood up for. It's appropriate that a work of historical indexing should observe the standards of that discipline, but an every-name index is still the genealogical standard.

She fought the law, and sometimes won

H-Net has a very handy review of A. Cheree Carlson's new book from University of Illinois Press, The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law. Carlson tells the stories of six prominent 19th- and early 20th-century cases involving women. Reviewer Tamar Carroll highlights the case of

Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, a Presbyterian minister's wife who drew her husband's ire when she took up Swedenborgianism, a mystical philosophy "at odds with traditional Christianity," and tried to convert to Methodism, more amenable to her newfound spiritual beliefs (p. 24). Before she could do so, Rev. Packer had her confined in the "maniac" ward of the Illinois State Hospital, where she remained until the superintendent released her three years later . . . . Upon her release, her husband took away Packard's clothes and locked his unrepentant wife in the nursery of their house; she managed to slide a note out the window frame to a neighbor, who sought judicial intervention.

What happened next? Read the whole thing. Sometimes clever lawyers were able to use 19th-century notions about feminity to win their clients' freedom.

For those of us who graze the banquet table of history, the review usefully contrasts and compares other books and articles on the legal perils of 19th-century women.

Hat tip to Legal History Blog.

Methodology Monday with Citations!

Mary Dudziak on the Legal History Blog just put in a plea for better citations to records in archives:

One citation had the author and recipient of a letter, and its date. That's all. The bibliography disclosed the collections consulted, so I could narrow it down to a couple of possible collections. But the citations contained no box or file numbers. It should have been easy to find the letter, but it was not in any of the files I examined.

Of course, the less often recognized reason for fuller citations is to evaluate the source, in terms of physical characteristics, provenance, creator's veracity and skill, and more.

Dudziak encourages her readers to stand up to penny-pinching editors who gut citations, referring them to US and Canadian archival guidelines. They might want to check out Evidence Explained while they're at it.

Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest -- 12 books and counting

Some days blogging is like a chain reaction. This time around the Legal History Blog alerted me to the new book Democracy in Session: A History of the Ohio General Assembly, by attorney David M. Gold, an attorney with the Ohio Legislative Service Commission. (Yes, this could be of genealogical interest -- and anyway, if Andrew Cayton says it contains "a host of colorful characters and anecdotes," I'm all for it.)

Poking around the book's website in turn revealed that it's the twelfth in a series of books on Law, Society, and Politics in the Midwest being published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. FYI the other titles are:

The Fairer Death: Executing Women in Ohio

American Pogrom: The East St. Louis Race Riot [1917] and Black Politics

The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio

Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community 1802-1868

The History of Indiana Law [on my shelf the last 13 months thanks to Maia's Books]

The History of Michigan Law

The History of Nebraska Law

The History of Ohio Law

No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics, and Geography in One of the Country's Busiest Death-Penalty States [Ohio]

A Place of Recourse: A History of the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, 1803-2003

The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War [1854, Wisconsin]

Check out their individual pages, and then either your local bookstore or WorldCat, depending on the state of the exchequer.

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.)

Weekend Warriors Book Reviewing Edition

Christopher Capozzolo at Legal History Blog points to an interesting article, "The Art of Book Reviewing," by historian Bruce Mazlish of MIT, first published in 2001. The general points will be familiar to a reader of the relevant chapter by Elizabeth Shown Mills in Professional Genealogy, but the details and the slant are different. It had never occurred to me that professionals in history or social science get just the same amount of systematic training in how to review books as we genealogists do -- none. Make the most of it!

Weekend Warriors Methodology Edition

Bearing in mind Tom Jones's concern that our genealogical education tends to focus more on records than on what to do with them once we have them, I'll try to occasionally branch out and take note of outstanding methodology materials, even if they don't refer specifically to Midwestern work.

Over on the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) mailing list, Debbie Parker Wayne points to a great one: a series of posts by legal historian Emily Kadens at Legal History Blog on working in archives. (Kadens's specialty is 18th-century European legal history.)

Working in Archives #1.

Working in Archives #2 (advance preparation).

Working in Archives #3 (using the archives).

Working in Archives #4 (transcriptions). She's definitely been there: "Archival work is very 'in the moment,' and so you always feel as if your memory will be vivid. But it won't be. And I hate the feeling later of wondering whether I missed something...."

Hopefully there will be more. And, echoing Tom once again, don't be too focused (even though I have linked to those specific posts!). Check out the rest of the blog. I plan to keep an eye on it and see what I can absorb and put to use.