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.]

Records in Unpredictable Places

One more thing probate records do: make unexpected connections between unexpected places in unexpected ways.

The largest county in the Midwest -- Cook County, Illinois -- is also a burned county. While abstracting probates three counties away in Indiana, I came across three pages copied from pre-Fire Cook County probate court records from the 1840s. The originals turned to ash in the Great Chicago Fire 141 years ago.

These records connect two early Midwestern movers and shakers. Micajah Terrell Williams -- an Ohio politician-entrepreneur with an interest in improved transportation and a founder of Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- had died in Cincinnati. William B. Ogden, Chicago's first mayor and a transportation leader cut from much the same cloth, was making a claim on Williams's estate. Following Williams's death, Ogden had been involved with land Williams had owned in (among other places) La Porte and Porter Counties in Indiana. Williams's probate appears to have been a tangled and lengthy affair, and there may be more to the story.

Only because a wealthy Cincinnatian invested in some Indiana farmland did a bit of long-gone Chicago history survive the fire in this courthouse 60 miles away. This piece of history will be a lot easier to find once we get these probates abstracted and indexed!


Micajah T. Williams estate no. 336, loose papers, La Porte County, Indiana; microfilm E-1, County Clerk, La Porte.

Harold Henderson, "Records in Unpredictable Places," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Milwaukee Marriages 1822-1876 on line

Research Buzz alerts us to a new on-line resource from the Milwaukee Public Library Digital Collections, already well worth a visit: the Milwaukee County Marriage Certificate collection. Here's part of the admirably clear and thorough description:

In the 1960s a box of marriage certificates created between 1822 and 1876 was found at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. The box also included some miscellaneous documents pertaining to the marriage such as permission to marry slips, authorizations, and land deeds. The information in these documents include a parent giving permission for an underage child to marry, an affidavit of there being no impediment to marriage, information on the closeness of the blood relationship, and written permission for the clerk to hand the marriage license to a third party for delivery. These documents generally do not have standardized information, but can be quite interesting. Many of these documents were not in very good condition. Research by the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society (MCGS) indicates that most of these certificates are not recorded at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Some of the records appear in the Wisconsin Pre-1907 Marriage Index and some do not.

The certificates and accompanying documents were filmed in 1966. The Milwaukee Public Library owns a set of these microfilmed marriage certificates. In 1999 the MCGS arranged to have the records refilmed, adding location citations. In 2000 MCGS volunteers created alphabetical indexes for bride and for groom. Roger Cobb with Lois Molitor acted as project coordinators. Over 42,000 names were put into the database that produced the indexes. Unfortunately, the original copies that were filmed in 1966 have vanished. . . .

Most of these documents were created in Milwaukee, but there are a few from other locations. The number of certificates created outside of Milwaukee County is minimal.

In short, if you have Milwaukee people, visit this site yesterday!

New sources for Wisconsin

The March-April issue of the Wisconsin Historical Society newsletter Columns notes two batches of documents recently placed on line at Turning Points in Wisconsin History:

300 pages of a total of around 3000 pages of records of the Anti-Saloon League focusing on the league's "secret infiltration of taverns in 1917-18," including "private investigators' reports of drinking in Delavan and Oconto Falls." (Query: can we see the PIs' expense reports?)

documents on Hispanic history in Wisconsin, including a history of migrant farm workers a century ago, "a social worker's mimeographed report on the Mexican-American community in Milwaukee in 1930, and a 1968 account of the founding of Obreros Unidos, a migrant workers' labor union."

Breaking down a brick wall + Milwaukee Germans

The occasional blog "Relative Musings" has a nice story about breaking down a "Bruce" family brick wall in early Milwaukee.

And if it's Germans in Milwaukee you want, be sure to visit Adele Marcum's really well sourced blog called, well, Milwaukee Germans.

Illinois Harvest goes out of state

Recent additions to Illinois Harvest may be useful to Midwestern researchers outside the Sucker State:

Pryor & Co.'s Stillwater City Directory, 1876-7 (Stillwater, Minnesota: Pryor & Co., 1876)

The Civil War Literature of Ohio, by Daniel Joseph Ryan (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1911)

Pioneer History of Milwaukee, from the First American Settlement in 1833..., by James Smith Buck (Milwaukee: Swain & Tate, 1881-1890), volume 1, 1833-1841.

Note to readers who have either (a) a deep interest in 19th-century Milwaukee or (b) an unimaginable amount of spare time: I know I saw three other entries for this book -- presumably the three remaining volumes -- but I've been unable to find them using Illinois Harvest's search function. If you type in a title, it's supposed to find only works containing all the words, but in fact it produces thousands of irrelevant results. In this case, the top two hits of 1,694 for "pioneer history of milwaukee" were a WPA publication on pioneer life in Illinois and an image of a building at Racine and Milwaukee in Chicago!

Hey, it could be me -- a free year's subscription to this blog to anyone who can reconcile their description of their search system with its actual performance.

Ten Thousand Ships in Milwaukee

Most folks take an interest in the vessels that carried their ancestors across the ocean, but how many of us know how much information there is on the boats that carried our people across the Great Lakes, from New York and Pennsylvania to Michigan or Wisconsin?

Right now I'm wishing I lived closer to Milwaukee (although at least I can get there entirely by train :-)). That's where the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society and the Milwaukee Public Library have consolidated the work of many Lakes aficionados into a Great Lakes Marine File that holds, among other things, records of more than 10,000 lake-going ships of all kinds from 1679 to 2008 and counting. Don't miss this chance to make our forebears' experiences real.