Genealogy resources for La Porte County, Indiana -- work in progress

Some of the northwest district Indiana county genealogists will be getting together today in La Porte, so I finally got serious about starting to put together a list of research resources for this medium-sized county. (You can either follow the link or go to midwestroots.net and click on "La Porte County Indiana" in the lower right-hand corner of the page.)

It's amazing what local genealogists have accomplished over the years. Except for the obituary indexes, where I got overwhelmed, I have tried to credit the authors/compilers when I could identify them.

The guide at present comes in four unequal-sized sections:

• Local Repositories and Societies (courthouse; libraries, archives, and museums; and on-line)

• Periodicals (two county newsletters and the two state periodicals)

• Indexes and Abstracts (70 and counting: for births, cemeteries, court records, deaths, divorces, funeral homes, land, marriages, military, naturalizations, newspapers, obituaries, periodicals, probates, professionals, and schools)

• Other Guides (the FamilySearch Wiki, the Indiana Genealogical Society's research page, the 1939 WPA Inventory of County Archives, and Linkpendium).

So far it's up to eight pages printed out, and as you can see I've stuck pretty much to indexes and the like, without yet starting to describe the actual records! It is a work in progress, so corrections and additions are welcome.

Harold Henderson, "Genealogy resources for La Porte County, Indiana -- work in progress," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 June 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Researching in a strange place? Here's help

Well, all places are strange once you get to know them ;-)  Last week I was interested to find that two friends and colleagues have just published articles on this exact topic: what to do when you're starting off in a locale where you haven't researched before. (Cruising the public library for your surname doesn't count.)

Writing in the NGS Magazine (yet another of the many benefits of being a National Genealogical Society member), Jay Fonkert says: know the geography, learn the history, determine what government kept the records, discover the records, and find other researchers.

Writing at About.com, Kimberly Powell says: get to know the area, learn the jurisdictions, consult local histories, scope out FamilySearch, read the newspaper, and connect with the locals.

Both make the same good basic points, and each has some unique pointers as well. And unless I slept through it, neither one mentioned one of my favorite entry points, Linkpendium.

It looks like I have an obscure Missouri county in my future. I think I'll reread both of these articles.




J. H. Fonkert, "Five tips for starting research in a new locale," NGS Magazine vol. 39 no. 3 (July-September 2013): 29-33.

Kimberly Powell, "Genealogy Research in a New Locality," About.com Genealogy, 30 July 2013 (http://genealogy.about.com/od/basics/tp/Genealogy-Research-In-A-New-Locality.htm : viewed 4 August 2013).



Harold Henderson, "Researching in a strange place? Here's help," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 August 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

What's old in Hamilton County, Illinois

Southern Illinois' Hamilton County (county seat McLeansboro) has a historical society whose website is new on Cyndi's List, including a listing of the society's next meeting (unfortunately in March), the location and hours of its museum and genealogical library, and its publications -- including oral histories taken in 1978 and recently transferred to CDs and made available for sale.

If you have folks in this part of the world, Linkpendium has a good set of links and the Hamilton County GenWeb site has some unusual transcriptions including state censuses of 1855 and 1865.

So it comes as rather a disappointment that out of the 36,000 or so people in my genealogy database, including a bunch of southern Illinoisans, no one (yet!) has a connection there.