Michigan -- another reason to attend FGS 2013 in Fort Wayne

[Reposted from the FGS 2013 conference blog.]

Is Michigan on your way to or from the 2013 FGS conference in Fort Wayne? Well, if it's not, you may need to consider making a cooling northward detour. Your trip begins . . . at these libraries and archives.

Van Buren District Library
200 North Phelps, Decatur
http://www.vbrgs.org/LocalHistoryDepartment.html
A lot of library in a small package.

Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collections
East Hall #111, Kalamazoo
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/
Library AND archives for southwestern counties.

Archives of Michigan
702 West Kalamazoo, Lansing
http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-54463_19313---,00.html
Their circulars alone are worth a virtual trip:
http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,4570,7-153-54463_54475_20992---,00.html

Library of Michigan
702 West Kalamazoo, Lansing
http://www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan/0,2351,7-160-18635---,00.html
Multiple resources for your Michigan research even if you don't get beyond their web page.

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library
5201 Woodward, Detroit
http://www.detroit.lib.mi.us/featuredcollection/burton-historical-collection
Over 4,000 manuscript collections, plus maps and photographs extending outward from Detroit and
deep into its multicultural past.

Evisceration

The news is not good from Michigan. For all those who live or work there, here's the informative letter from the Michigan Genealogical Council on the situation as of February 21. The Library of Michigan faces a 23% budget cut; its staff will soon be reduced to 30 (once it was 100); and many services and non-Michigan holdings are likely to be terminated. Lobbying may help a little, but we may have to hope that institutions with better funding will be able to take up some of the slack.

Hoosiers shouldn't look down on Michigan's troubles; the Indiana State Archives has been poorly housed, underfunded, and understaffed for many years. The staff and volunteers are great, but they need better support.

Michiganders, man the telephones!

News via the Winter 2010 print newsletter of the Michigan Genealogical Council:

The Library of Michigan is alive, but it has a new URL (www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan) and it's about to take a 20% budget whack. (Call your legislators!) So far they are still able to cooperate with the Archives (which now has a different budget source) in putting records on line. State census records may be next.

Index to Indexes of Michigan Newspapers!

The Library of Michigan soldiers valiantly on despite the stress being laid on it by state government cutbacks. The new issue of the sadly truncated Michigan Genealogist brings welcome good news from research LeRoy Bennett who has completed an 8-page PDF listing, "Indexes to Michigan Newspapers," covering more than 200 newspaper indexes whether on-line, in-library, or completely off-line. Adrian, Michigan, has an online index of death and marriage records in Lenawee County newspapers, 1850s-1870s, on GenWeb. At the far end of the alphabet, vital records from the Ypsilanti Commercial have been indexed from 1876 to 1883, and the index is in the Burton Collections of the Detroit Public Library (fee for entry).

Note that the indexes are listed alphabetically by city AND BY COUNTY, so if you don't find your town of choice you may possibly find tidbits from it indexed under the county name. My ownrecent research targets of Cheboygan and Montcalm counties didn't show, but maybe next time. I just love finding aids to finding aids.

Partial Saturday in Little Rock -- sign a petition for the Library of Michigan!

I had to leave early on the last day of the FGS conference, but did pick up a few thoughts:

* Got an ancestor in the 1830 census and no idea where he or she lived, because the county wasn't yet divided into townships? As part of the discussion of her "sure-fire never-fail" "5-P test for proving identity," Elizabeth Shown Mills gave a whirlwind demonstration of how to use census neighbors' landholdings to track the path of the census taker and thus locate individuals who hadn't purchased land.

* Paula Stuart Warren went through at least 20 different kinds of school records (I lost count) and almost as many different places to find them.

* Richard Sayre gave the nuts and bolts of topographic maps and the relevant coordinate systems. This seems to have been map day, because he too wound up showing how to correlate a variety of maps to find the exact present-day location of an ancestral farm, using online sources.

I was especially disappointed to miss Tom Jones on "Solving Problems with Original Sources," including such rarely consulted sources as Revolutionary War pension final payment vouchers, Federal district court papers, and "loose" probate papers (that is, the evidence and forms filed in the case, as opposed to the matter copied and preserved in will and probate record books). Fortunately, this session, like most, was to be recorded on CD by Jamb Tapes, Inc. of St. Louis and hopefully will soon be available via their web site. Their people had a several-times-daily aerobic workout coordinating the recording of speakers at far opposite ends of the Peabody Hotel and Statehouse Convention Center complex.

State-level news: Illinois has started planning for hosting the 2011 FGS in Springfield. And the joint FGS-NGS Records Preservation and Access Committee has started an on-line petition to save the Library of Michigan. The legislature can still reject the governor's ill-advised executive order that would disperse the library's collections; so far only one house has acted.

If you lost your job, would you chop up your garage for kindling wood?

I didn't think so. But that's approximately what the state of Michigan will do unless the legislature steps in -- try to save on the state budget by dismantling the Library of Michigan, said to be the tenth largest genealogical library in the US. If you live or work in Michigan, take a minute to visit the Western Michigan Genealogical Society and ponder what you can do. Anyone in NW Indiana want to share a drive to Lansing on August 5?

Michigan 1897-1920 Death Search Fixed

Just in case y'all don't track the comments, Kris Rzepczynski of the Library of Michigan reports the search problems fixed, and I'm happy to confirm that. The advanced search will do some intricate things if you need it to. ... It also looks like they are adding some post-1920 years. Enjoy!

The ultimate Michigan Civil War resource

You're going to be sorry your ancestors didn't all flock to Michigan to join the Union Army...

I blundered into a fantastic archival collection on line at Seeking Michigan -- digital images of original Civil War records in 1486 folders, each containing (as far as I looked) between 25 and 85 documents. According to the collection description, "The records document the history of Michigan soldiers in the form of muster rolls, letters, lists of dead, monthly returns and other materials sent to the state Adjutant General during the war. Funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission." The Library of Michigan and the Archives of Michigan and the Leota and Talbert Abrams Foundation are involved.

If you have a research target who served in a Michigan unit in the war, and you know which one, you can conduct archival research on him from your desktop. (From the lists I saw it's obvious that many men not living in Michigan saw service there.) The interface isn't ideal, but if you click on printable version, that image is much easier to navigate and very detailed.

I can't tell if this is everything, but it's enormous. It's not indexed but it is organized by unit. Folder titles are searchable so browsing is probably the way to get started. To browse this collection, hit "advanced search," in that window move "Civil War Records" from the box on the left to the box on the right," and hit search. And pretty much wherever you land you'll find a surprise. I just found a bunch of Mexican War records!

Michigan Cemetery Sources!

The Library of Michigan maintains a map and book/microfilm index to cemeteries across the state of Michigan. Much of this material is also in hard copy at the Allen County Public Library not too far south of the state line, as the Michigan Cemetery Source Book and the Michigan Cemetery Atlas. Hat tip to Cynthia Theusch's article in the December 31 issue of their "Genealogy Gems."

Michigan Genealogist, 4th issue of 2008

From the Michigan Department of History, Arts, and Libraries comes the state's closest thing to a statewide genealogy publication, Michigan Genealogist #4 (PDF) for 2008:

There's advance notice of six Saturday-afternoon sessions 4 April 2009 called "Learning More at the Library of Michigan," specific topics to be announced in February. Free but registration required due to limited seating. ... Be aware that many residents of northern Indiana and northwest Ohio may be closer to Lansing than to their own state capitals! Based on a flying visit last month, the Library of Michigan is the easiest state library to reach by car that I've ever seen (getting out of town is a little trickier) and it looks like a wonderful place to work.

The library is getting microfilm sets of city directories 1936-1960, which is big news if you're a devotee or someone who's pining away waiting for the 1940 census to be made public in 2012. LOM now has these for Toledo, Columbus, Indianapolis, and eight smaller Indiana cities.

And a Christmas Eve present for those with Michigan medical ancestors: special collections librarian Gloriane Peck lists a number of biographical books on hand that cover public health nurses, Jewish physicians, black medical graduates of the U of M, and women physicians, plus two directories from 1885 and 1893. Check out this useful set of descriptions, even if you have to search for them closer to hand.

Michigan's Abrams Genealogy Seminar July 25-26

In the absence of the usual statewide genealogy organization, the Library of Michigan is a key institution holding that state's genealogy community together. It's sponsoring a day-and-a-half seminar in Lansing July 25-26 that anyone with research targets in Michigan will want to consider. Just a sampling of the topics to be covered:

• finding Revolutionary War ancestors at the Library of Michigan

• Michigan township records, "a genealogical gold mine"

• Treasures of the Archives of Michigan

• the digitization project for state death records 1897-1920

• the Local History and Genealogical Collection of the Public Library of Saginaw (PDF)

• Ceil Wendt Jensen, CG, on newspaper research

• the Local History and Genealogy Department at Loutit District Library in Grand Haven

Two Michigan Libraries, from a devoted user

Jasia at Creative Gene has an eloquent and substantive appreciation of the Library of Michigan in Lansing and the Burton Historical Collection at Detroit Public Library. Read and file for when you take on those difficult Michigan relatives. And for those of us who think of libraries as eternal and unshakeable, her story of what happened to the Burton Collection is worth paying attention to.

Michigan Genealogist, first issue of 2008

The latest issue of the web-only Michigan Genealogist from the Library of Michigan features a number of interesting sources at the library, including:

Michigan Deaths 1897-1920, the microfilms of which will actually be unavailable until the end of July because they're being digitized by Ancestry.com; after that point that they'll be available on the library's website for free.

Microfilm of all issues of the Grand Rapids Herald 1898-1959, a time span that nicely matches the Western Michigan Genealogical Society's excellent online obituary index.

Microfilm of certificates of enrollment issued for merchant vessels at Oswego, New York, 1815-1911 -- i.e., could be information on the ship your ancestors traveled west on. These are National Archives and Records Administration publication M2107 (PDF introduction).

About 30 editions of the Michigan State Gazetteer and Business Directory between 1860 and 1932.

Early Ontario records which include Loyalist family claims. One woman's husband, "always a friend of Gt. Britain," was reported to have left Westmoreland County in western Pennsylvania and "set out to get into [British-held] Detroit" in September 1780, but "was killed by the Indian who had undertaken to be his guide." His widow and children made it two years later.

There's much more, including listings of the oldest people recorded dying in various Michigan counties during 1868, records of soldiers wounded in wars between 1790 and 1848, and an account of temperance activism in Lansing.