FYI: A new institute that Midwesterners can drive to!

Internet genealogy, Germanic genealogy, intermediate genealogy, advanced genealogy -- these are the four courses that will be offered May 28-June 1, 2015, in Galesburg, Knox County, Illinois, at the Carl Sandburg Institute of Genealogy.

Michael John Neill (probably the first "real" genealogist I was ever aware of) is the organizer; course coordinators in order are Cyndi Ingle, Teresa McMillin, CG; Debra Mieszala, CG, and Neill. Details are in the works and you can sign up for updates via their Facebook page, but if for some reason you can't wait, ask Michael at mneill@sandburg.edu.




Harold Henderson, "FYI: A new institute that Midwesterners can drive to!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Good news for Illinois AND Indiana researchers

The indefatigable Michael John Neill points us to a treasure trove of Illinois statutes at Western Illinois University, both compiled statutes and session laws.

In another part of this site I discovered a link to a publication I'd never seen, hosted at Internet Archive, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Official Publications of the Territory and State of Indiana from 1809 to 1890, originally published as Indiana Historical Society Pamphlet No. 1. The publications are listed roughly by subject matter or agency, from the Adjutant General to the War Office.

The descriptions include explanations of the often obscure bureaucracy and how it functioned at the time to produce the records we seek now. For instance, it turns out that the first two reports of the Indiana State Health Commission, in 1879 and 1880, were published in the report of the chief of the State Bureau of Statistics and Geology. These might be of interest as this was when the idea of the state of Indiana collecting birth and death information was being considered and developed and discussed. But who would have looked there?



Harold Henderson, "Good news for Illinois AND Indiana researchers ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Illinois and Wisconsin additions to FamilySearch

Recent additions to FamilySearch's increasingly impressive collection of free on-line record indexes and/or original images:

Marriages 1810-1934 -- searchable but no images -- in the Illinois counties of Adams, Alexander, Bond, Boone, Brown, Champaign, Christian, Clark, and Clay. This is an extra three-plus decades over the coverage of the venerable Illinois Statewide Marriage Index. I would be interested to see a comparison sample of the coverage between the two where they do overlap.

Probate estate files for various date ranges -- browseable images only -- in the Wisconsin counties of Green, Pepin, Shawano, and Trempeleau.

Scroll down the whole list looking for the little asterisks on the right to see what's new lately. I don't promise to be able to keep up even with just the Midwestern portion of this enterprise.

Thanks to Michael John Neill for the heads-up.




Thanks to Michael John Neill for the heads-up.

Case File Clues (plug)

For 29 cents a week, you can read a brief informative first-person account of ongoing genealogical research; it comes by email as a PDF attachment. And it just happens to be written by my favorite genealogist from western Illinois, Michael John Neill (who was also the headliner at last months Illinois state conference).

This week's issue of Casefile Clues deals with the vexing problem of when to hire a professional researcher, and how to go about it if you do. That's good information, but there's a bonus: the meat of the problem is hard-core Chicago research involving name changes, death/disappearance, probate, and property records. (Neill's ancestors pack more melodrama into a few decades than mine did into a few centuries.) Try it, I think you'll like it.

Illinois Fall Conference October 24 in Elgin

No, it is not too early to be thinking about fall conferences. No time or money for the big national events? There's good stuff closer to home. Western Illinois' own Michael John Neill is the featured speaker at the one-day, four-session conference of the Illinois State Genealogical Society at Elgin Community College Saturday, October 24. Also Craig Pfannkuche on railroad research, Lesley Martin on "Finding Your Roots in a Chicago Building," and Tina Beaird on preserving family heirlooms, and more. Program and directions here and registration here.

Still more confusing Chicago City Directories!

Back in April I blogged about the many books hiding under the simple guise of "Chicago City Directory for [year]." Besides the free sites Newberry Library's Chicago Ancestors, Chicago History Museum, and Illinois Harvest, Footnote.com is also in the fray.

Key new information here: what Footnote.com calls the 1871 Chicago City Directory is apparently identical to Illinois Harvest's Edwards' ... annual directory ... of Chicago. v.14 I say "apparently" because the Footnote.com version includes two additional title pages, one characterizing it as a "Fire Edition" and claiming that its information has been carried up to December 12, 1871, but so far the pages I have viewed contain the same information in the same format as before.

Each of these online sources has its good points, and each has directories the others lack.

The Newberry's site is linked with other very useful resources for Chicago research, including a mapping function and the Chicago History Museum's book documenting the 1911 street renumbering in PDF format. It also breaks the directories up into units by letter so that you don't have to download the whole thing. It has directories designated as 1866, 1870, Edwards' Census 1871, 1875, 1880, 1885, 1892, and 1900. (Check my earlier post for more detailed citation proposals, especially for the confusing 1870-1872 period.)

Illinois Harvest requires you to download the whole thing, but it prints up very nicely and it preserves the original page order, which is no small matter if you've struggled with Footnote.com. As far as I know IH has only two directories, Edwards' volume 12 (1869-1870), and Edwards' volume 14 (1871, not the same as "Edwards' Census" displayed at the Newberry site).

Footnote.com, the only pay site discussed here, has more directories than anyone -- 1843-1849, 1851-1889, 1902-1903, and 1908-1909. You can search across years and save wanted pages in a "gallery." But. The last three years are incomplete as of midday 27 July 2008. And many of the complete directories have their pages out of order. Each directory's unpaginated front matter is dumped at the back, making it an adventure to find the title page for proper citation, and the variously paginated portions of the directory are usually presented, not in their original sequence (which heaven knows was arbitrary enough), but by page number. For example, the residential directory's page 21 is followed by the business directory's page 21, and so forth. Also, Footnote.com has taken the liberty of renaming the 1874-5 directory as "1874," 1875-6 as "1875," and so forth through 1878-9. The print quality is a bit below the Newberry and Illinois Harvest standard. (Some related discussion on Michael John Neill's Rootdig blog and on the Association of Professional Genealogists' listserv, both of which are free and should be lurked on by any wannabe genealogist.)

Lest we forget, the Chicago History Museum has the 1928 "criss-cross" Chicago directory on line (and many other on and off line resources). But you will need to know the street on which your research target lived in order to find him or her, as (from my point of view) the directory only has the criss and not the cross. I found it a little touchy to get loaded but it would probably help to have the latest PDF reader.

The fact is that Chicago researchers who don't live next door to a major genealogy library can't do without any of these four sites. And we can't afford to call "1871 Chicago City Directory" an adequate citation, either.

Neill on saving $

Illinois-based researcher and writer Michael John Neill has some ideas at 24-7 Family History Circle on reducing your travel budget without reducing your research -- and his commenters add some more. No one so far has mentioned carpooling. Are we too individualistic in our schedules for that?

Getting out of the Dark Ages

Michael John Neill, writing in Ancestry Weekly Journal, uses Kentucky as an example to give a concise reminder of basic research procedures for dealing with research targets in the "Dark Ages" before the 1850 census.

Believe it or not, my wife has been telling me this for years

Michael John Neill at rootdig.com:

with the advent of searchable databases, most genealogists are not coming anywhere close to tracking what they search for in a specific database or on a given website. ...

I've seen articles where it has been said someone cannot be found in a census. I rarely see where the specific unsuccessful searches are listed out in an attempt to defend the "can't find them statement."

Read the whole thing. Remember, the dog that didn't bark in the night-time was evidence in Sherlock Holmes' day, and it still is.

DuPage County has a longer reach than you think

The other day I looked up the program for the February 23 annual meeting of the DuPage County (Illinois) Genealogical Society, and got a pleasant surprise. (FYI if you're not from Illinois: DuPage is Chicago's biggest suburban county.)

The society is bringing in speakers that should attract genealogists with no ancestral ties to the county at all, such as yours truly. They include Elissa Scalise Powell, CG, of western Pennsylvania; Jana Sloan Broglin, CG, of Ohio; and Michael John Neill (whose blog made me give this a second look; if you don't recognize his name, you really have not been paying attention). I like the idea of bringing in folks from "upstream" states, where our research will often take us, whether we approve or not!

Information here on the one-day event will be in St. Charles. (It's not too late -- see you there?)

DPCGS president Jeffrey Bockman will also give an overview of using maps in genealogical research; he got some publicity last month in the local Naperville Sun.

Old newspapers in Quincy and on your desktop

I'm a big fan of Michael John Neill, not because he's from western Illinois too, but because he weaves genealogy lessons so neatly into the stories of his own ongoing research. In this recent post on his rootdig.com site, he points out that while many big-name pay-for-view genealogy sources have collected old newspapers and made them searchable, they aren't the only place to look.

All genealogy is local. Neill reports that the Quincy Public Library in Adams County, Illinois, has "scanned old Quincy area newspapers from the microfilm, and created a digital database that can be searched."

And all genealogy is global: if you're lucky enough to have research targets in western Illinois between 1835 and 1890, you can search for them here. (Oops, "Please note that the Archive may not function properly using Mozilla Firefox.") FYI, the first paper they have for this old river town is the 17 Apr 1835 issue of the Illinois Bounty Land Register.