On-line newspapers by state

Digitized newspapers are everywhere, but so many different outfits -- both free and commercial -- are getting in on the act that it can be hard to keep with which ones are available where your ancestors lived. Kenneth R. Marks over at The Ancestor Hunt has a series of listings by state, including Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, as well as New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maine. I haven't used them all . . . yet.


Harold Henderson, "On-line newspapers by state," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Sleuthing for Smiths in Alabama and Mississippi

This blog doesn't normally reach so far south of the Mason-Dixon Line, but blog rules were made to be broken. And what better time than to take note of Laurel Baty's methodological tour de force that leads off the current (June) National Genealogical Society Quarterly (online issues free to NGS members)?

Given a Smith family, she deals smoothly with an array of erroneous records, not to mention the ones that aren't there at all: "Three generations of Martha's family left no estate records. Her parents' marriage record is missing, her father owned no land, and he appears in a single census, which supplies no ages and birthplaces."

She maps and lists land, court, and church records to help identify a father who appears in none of them. The footnotes are revealing: the four words "He witnessed no deeds" are backed up by an every-page search of 23 years of Wilcox County, Alabama, deed books. This article will benefit any researcher, in the South or elsewhere, who's troubled by common-name ancestor issues.




Laurel T. Baty, "Parentage of Martha Smith of Alabama and Mississippi: Overcoming Inconsistent, Incorrect, and Missing Records," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (June 2013): 85-102.



Harold Henderson, "Sleuthing for Smiths in Alabama and Mississippi," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 August 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day Zero (Tuesday August 28): Save The Records!

If you sit down at a table near the Federation of Genealogical Societies registration booth in the Birmingham convention center, eventually everyone in the (genealogy) world will come by. In the course of the day I learned about certain early Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, probate records that are stored inaccessibly somewhere in "the mines" (presumably old coal mines), and about lumber companies in Mississippi tearing up whole cemeteries without a peep from cowed legislators.

Which pretty well set the stage for the Association of Professional Genealogists' usual Tuesday-night pre-conference roundtable on access to records and the "art of advocacy." Organized by Diane Gravel (New England) and chaired by Thomas MacEntee (Illinois), four knowledgeable panelists discussed how genealogists can deal with rampant misinformation about open records and then go on to advocate for:
(1) the preservation of records,
(2) open access to them, and
(3) adequate funding for the repositories that manage and maintain them.

Panelists were Alvie Davidson, CG (sm) (Florida), Teri Flack (Texas), Polly Kimmitt, CG (sm) (Massachusetts) and Kelvin L. Meyers (Texas).

The panelists took turns answering pre-set questions from the chair. Teri added a note of cheer in telling the tale of a Texas Court Records Task Force that led to a great improvement in record preservation and openness in the state (not spearheaded by genealogists but by judges, if I remember right). The panelists agreed that in the year 2017 genealogists will still be fighting over these three records issues -- and if we aren't, the results will be not be good. APG will be doing more work along these lines -- meaning ultimately that its members will be.

And in doing so we'll need to make friends and alliances with other groups that have similar interests, and find ways to dramatize their importance. Librarians have "Banned Books Week." What could we do to put "No Records Week" in the headlines? A visual representation of the 55 million Texas records unprocessed and unidentified for lack of funding? A story of a family of siblings reunited because Illinois recently opened its adoption records? Your idea here . . .



Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Zero (Tuesday August 28): Save the Records!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Bookends Friday with theater genealogy

What were your ancestors watching? Chances are Joe Jefferson was in it.

This review in the New York Review of Books ($) inspired me to pick up The Man Who Was Rip Van Winkle , by Benjamin McArthur, from my local library. Partly it's because some of my research has touched on the theater world of the late 1800s and early 1900s (if you recognize the name "Eunice Goodrich," whose company toured out of Chicago, you have the same problem!).

What McArthur has done is use the career of Joseph Jefferson -- a masterful comic actor and household word 130 years ago -- to follow the history of the country and in particular the theater within it through the nineteenth century. The Jefferson family (no known relation to the third president of the US) was a theatrical clan back in the days when actors were at best marginal characters in society. Joe himself went from riding down the Mississippi on a flatboat from one small-town gig to the next, to an opulent old age. Again, this is one for the context files. At one point they presented their repertoire in a pig pen in Pekin (Tazewell County), Illinois, and later gave several plays to an audience in a remote Mississippi barnyard, with no light other than the moon.

(The Yale University Press web site above claims to include a table of contents and index but did not when I visited.)