Digitized newspapers in Champaign County, Illinois

If that headline doesn't make your heart go pit-a-pat, then you're reading the wrong blog! IMHO, digitized every-word-searchable newspaper images are the gold standard, and a gold mine. So it's a happy day when the Scout Report brings word of the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Right now the collection offers the UIUC student newspaper, the Daily Illini, from 1916 to 1936, with 1936-1945 promised soon; and the local daily, the Urbana Daily Courier from 1916 to 1925, with 1902-1915 and 1926-1935 promised soon.

Here's some of the tech part:

The Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection (IDNC) is a project of the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. The IDNC is a repository of digital facsimiles of historic Illinois newspapers. Using digital imaging technology, we have converted microfilmed newsprint into preservation quality image files. Equipped with Olive Software's Active Paper Archive platform, the IDNC delivers access versions of the image files through the customizable user-friendly interface. The interface allows users with internet connections to browse the newspapers by date or search by keyword across articles, advertisements and photo captions. Users can print, download, or e-mail individual articles. And it's free! We plan to add additional years of Illinois newspapers to the repository as funding becomes available.

The genealogy part doesn't need much explanation. I've already found a fascinating account of a second cousin on my mother's father's side (with the unhelpful surname Aye) who gave an impassioned speech to the local WCTU about alcoholism. He is described as a "newspaperman, and a former Methodist minister," and someone "whose experience for the past twelve years covers every phase of the evil, both from the inside and the outside." Hmmmm...

Methodist resources at DePauw

Last week I spent a productive research afternoon at the DePauw University archives in Greencastle (Putnam County) Indiana. Their holdings include both university and Methodist information.

The archives' web site offers many opportunities to plan your research, particularly by enabling a search of their Indiana Ministers (1800-1900) Index, which covers eight predecessor denominations: Methodist Episcopal (ME), Methodist Episcopal South (MES) Methodist Protestant (MP), United Brethren in Christ (UB), Evangelical Association (EV), Lexington Conference (LX), Chicago German Methodist (CH), and Central German Methodist (CG).

For Methodist Episcopals, key accessible references are the bound minutes of the annual conferences. Microfilm holdings provide access to some circuits' and churches' early records. All this and places to plug in your laptop too!

Eli Farmer on the Methodist frontier

There may not be enough genealogy for some tastes in Riley B. Case's new Indiana Magazine of History article "'An Aggressive Warfare': Eli Farmer [1794-1881] and Methodist Revivalism in Early Indiana," but there's plenty of the historical background that good genealogy requires. (The March issue's table of contents is here.)

Methodism was an overwhelming presence in early Indiana. Official Methodist journals reported membership in Indiana in ten-year increments: 775 in 1810, 4,410 in 1820, 20,095 in 1830; 36,076 in 1840; and 72,404 in 1850. From 1805 to 1850, Methodists established 778 churches in Indiana -- more than Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Quakers combined. Methodist strength, however, was almost certainly greater than such statistics suggest. Federal census takers considered a 'church' to be a building, with a determined property value, set aside for religious functions. Methodist circuits included societies, classes, regular and irregular preaching points. {89-90}

The story of Farmer's struggles in the 1830s with thugs on one hand and his own denomination's hierarchy on the other makes a good read. Like some other pastors, he had a successful second career as a businessman, but by the 1870s came to rue the Methodists' growing respectability.