Good news for Wisconsin researchers!

The Wisconsin State Historical Society kindly takes us behind the curtain and lets us know that it's about halfway through digitizing its 8,000 Sanborn insurance maps, proceeding alphabetically. So this is especially good news if your town of interest is big enough and falls in the alphabet between Ableman (Sauk County, 1912) and Marshfield (Wood County, 1904). The rest of the alphabet should be done by next spring, and will be followed by digitizing the 800 insurance maps for Milwaukee, which present special problems. You can go direct to their free on-line map images too.

And if there's anyone reading this who never heard of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, you are in for the treat of your genealogy life. Intended to record information relevant to the insurability of specific buildings and towns, for us they offer detailed enough information to build a replica of our ancestors'  late-19th- or early-20th-century home towns. (I used them a bunch when writing about my relatives in Wharton, Texas, a place where I have never set foot.)


Harold Henderson, "Good news for Wisconsin researchers!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 November  2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Reasons to wish your ancestors died in eastern Ohio and central Wisconsin

The New England Historical and Genealogical Society eNews for 5 March (which should be archived here but doesn't seem to be) highlights two Midwestern libraries' online databases:

nearly 25,000 obituaries from the weekly Louisville Herald in Stark County, Ohio, by way of the Louisville Public Library, and

more than 200,000 newspaper records from the Marshfield [Wisconsin] Public Library, covering Wood, Marathon, and Clark counties.