Good news for researchers with Missouri black sheep!

Missouri now has arguably the best on-line information about prisoners, including PDFs of the log book including any identifying scars. Two other Midwestern states have transcriptions which may or may not be complete: Illinois and Indiana. (For Indiana, choose "Institution" from the drop-down menu "Record Series," then choose one of several correctional institutions from the drop-down menu "Collections." The resulting search form can be tailored for county and span of years. A null search will not work, so just go through the vowels to develop your own custom list for a given county and period.) Cyndi's List has numerous links but the actual pickings are slim.

So you definitely want your ancestral miscreants to have been caught in the Show-Me State. And while you're there, check out all the other good records Missouri is putting on line. If you state's prison records can better Missouri's, let us know in the comments.

Illinois Civil War, Kalamazoo, Route 66, and more -- what's not to like?

Has anybody out there still not subscribed to the smart, knowledgeable, uncluttered weekly collection of links from the University of Wisconsin's Internet Scout Report?

If so, this would be a good week to take a look. It's almost as if Midwestern Microhistory had a secret agent there! Starting at the center of this blog's geographic interest and working out:

Digitized Civil War letters from Illinois (Northern Illinois University)

Photos from Kalamazoo College (Kalamazoo College)

Oral histories of Route 66 in Missouri (Missouri State University)

Central Pennsylvania landscape, landscape architecture, and architecture (Penn State University)

Old New Hampshire maps and atlases (University of New Hampshire)

Archive of Early American Images, 1600s-early 1800s (Brown University)

Even when we want to, it's not always easy for genealogists to find their way to the resources of academia. This outlet -- either as weekly newsletter or as web site -- is worth the time for that reason alone.



Harold Henderson, "Illinois Civil War, Kalamazoo, Route 66, and more -- what's not to like?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 May 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Tracing an informal adoption using ordinary sources

In the lead article of the March National Genealogical Society Quarterly, Paul K. Graham, CG, AG, finds the well-hidden facts of the parentage of Mrs. Florence Nelson (1862-1942), who died at one end of Indiana (Elkhart County) and was buried at the other (Switzerland County).

The article uses commonplace genealogy sources from Indiana and Missouri, but deploys uncommon logic in analyzing, correlating, and resolving their contradictions. Florence's death certificate was filled out wrong, but even that error provided a clue. Her 1887 marriage record named her parents -- but that was only the beginning. She was completely unmentioned in her father's probate. Was her own statement in her marriage record wrong?

Get your copy of the Q to find out how the apparent contradiction was resolved -- it's in good genealogy libraries everywhere and is a benefit of NGS membership. The article solved the genealogical question, but it stands as a reminder that even the best genealogy cannot always explain the family history. "The most consequential event of her life -- separation from her family -- remains unexplained."




Paul K. Graham, "A Family for Florence I. (Crouse) Nelson: Unraveling an Informal Adoption in Missouri or Indiana," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (March 2013): 7-18.


Harold Henderson, "Tracing an informal adoption using ordinary sources," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 April 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Josephus Waters Family in The Genealogist

One of the greatest services a genealogist can do for colleagues and researchers everywhere is to publish results that distinguish families that are easily confused -- especially ones involving a common name or one that's hard to search for. In the fall issue of The Genealogist, Gale Ion Harris takes up the family of pioneer surveyor Josephus Burton Waters (1750?-1826?) of Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky. He has also described, and will be describing further, the apparently unrelated but nearby Isaac Waters family. I hope more of us will be inspired to publish our "wrong" families, and not leave their evidence on the cutting-room floor!

Seven of Josephus's children had children. The author notes that there may be a few more unidentified, and still succeeds in locating 54 grandchildren. Many family members stayed in Kentucky; others dispersed to Texas, Louisiana, Oregon, and California, as well as various Midwestern counties: Marion and Jefferson in Illinois; Jennings in Indiana; Highland, Clermont, and Brown in Ohio; Jackson in Missouri; and Scott, Washington, Taylor, Wapello, and Lucas in Iowa. For reasons not made clear the author sometimes rested content with derivative sources for wills, deeds, newspapers, and court records, but other Waters family researchers need not look this spirited gift horse in the mouth, as enough information is available for them to fill in those omissions.



Gale Ion Harris, "Josephus Burton Waters of Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky: A Pioneer Surveyor," The Genealogist 26, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 272-93.


Harold Henderson, "Josephus Waters Family in The Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Many Lives of GW Edison Jr. -- NGSQ Genealogy Olympics

We expect records to be occasionally mistaken, but few of us expect our ancestors to lie repeatedly. When they do, we have to step our research methodology up a notch. That's what Tom Jones did in the fourth of four articles in the amazing June 2012 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly. (I've already posted on the Pratt, Hackenberger, and Northamer articles.)

Those of us who enrolled in the first Advanced Evidence Practicum at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy in January got to wrestle with this problem for a day, in confidence, prior to publication. I think I'm safe in saying that it pinned most of us to the mat.

The individual in question -- George Wellington Edison Jr. (1861-1940) -- came from a good family and often held a skilled job. He also, in Jones's words, "used four names, married five times, was divorced twice, committed bigamy once, and had twelve children." Raised in Quincy, Adams County, Illinois, he bounced around Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana, helped build the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and died in Decatur, Macon County, Illinois.

Genealogists tracking an accomplished con man like this need to be wary, maintain a broad focus, and constantly test and correlate information from a variety of sources. For the specifics and the many intriguing sub-problems, I encourage you to read and reread!



Thomas W. Jones, "Misleading Records Debunked: The Surprising Case of George Wellington Edison Jr.," National Genealogical Society Quarterly vol. 100, no. 2 (June 2012):133-56.


Harold Henderson, "The Many Lives of GW Edison Jr. -- NGSQ Genealogy Olympics," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Lidie Harkness Newton, an appreciation (possibly off topic)

Last week I grabbed a 50-cent used paperback from our local library's perpetual-book-sale rack, just because I had enjoyed something else the author (Jane Smiley) had written. It never occurred to me that this fiction would anything more than a pleasant escape. But sometimes fiction can get us closer to the human side of history than non-fiction can.

Set in the 1850s in Illinois and Kansas and Missouri, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton begins as a coming-of-age story and a bit of a love story -- and then everything changes. Both the heroine-narrator and the reader find themselves suddenly in deep water. Not until I finished it did I realize the Lidie was a bit like Voltaire's Candide in that picaresque tale. But unlike Candide she's a very real person as well as a vehicle for the author.

Smiley's lesson is a good deal more subtle than Voltaire's. In my mind, few issues in all of history, and none in American history, are more clear-cut than the fathomless moral evil that was human slavery and its ongoing aftermath. Smiley sets her story in the middle of a boiling conflict over slavery, and uses Lidie's adventures to show the human faces of an "issue" and compel the reader to pay a different kind of attention. No, she didn't change my mind, and I don't think she meant to. It's more about what you do with your assurance, maybe, or . . .

Actually, maybe we can't even have this conversation until you've read the book too.



Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (New York: Knopf, 1998).


Harold Henderson, "Lidie Harkness Newton, an appreciation," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Sixty Million Acres!

Thanks to the helpful folks on the Transitional Genealogists list, I have now purchased and read James W. Oberly's detailed study, Sixty Million Acres: American Veterans and the Public Lands before the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990). It's definitely worth your time if you deal regularly with bounty-land recipients under the four different Congressional acts passed in 1847, 1850, 1852, and 1855, which together involved most veterans of most wars from the War of 1812 through the Mexican War. It's also good microscopic historical background, connecting these laws with the changing politics of that era, and also reviewing and modifying past interpretations by earlier generations of historians.

Oberly starts with the politics: how Congress decided how to distribute the public land (it all started with the need to boost recruitment pronto during the Mexican War), how the administrative offices implemented distribution, and how the recipients (veterans and widows) used their warrants.

At the time, there was much concern about speculators monopolizing land or bilking veterans. Oberly finds little evidence that they did, but they did make some windfall profits.

The expectation that these warrants would spark additional settlement by the veterans themselves was also not fulfilled. (A very rough comparison: if the government offered Alaskan bush land to Vietnam-era veterans now, how many would choose to go?) In Oberly's random sample of warrants, fewer than 5 percent of the recipients used them to "locate" land for themselves. {92} Most warrants were sold, often through middlemen, and there were intertwined national and local markets for them. The market seems to have been competitive, and somewhat volatile. In general Oberly thinks the sellers did OK. (Genealogical lesson #1: if you find such a warrant in use, the odds are very good that the person who took up the land was not the original recipient and quite possibly not a veteran of any of those wars.)

The line of settlement pretty much determined where the warrants ended up being located: Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin together make up roughly half the acreage, with Missouri and Minnesota close behind. {85} Southern states were underrepresented in part because the big boom state in those years was Texas, which had its own public-lands system inherited from its brief independence.

On down the trail

Did your research targets move right on to Missouri? Or Alaska? (Hey, they're both west of here!)
Or did they stay put northwest of Chicago, say, in Mt. Prospect? Then check out the linked resources, all courtesy of the ever-vigilant New England Historic & Genealogical Society's eNews (click on a particular issue in the up-to-date archive for a signup link). The Missouri papers, part of an impressive online state presence, are fairly scattered; the Alaska index is mostly to headlines. Enjoy!

Midwestern genealogy in New England Ancestors

New England Ancestors is to the New England Historic and Genealogical Register as the NGS Magazine is to the National Genealogical Society Quarterly -- more popular, less formal and scholarly. NEA and NGSM have less prestige but wider appeal and more flexibility. This quarter NEA is featuring western New York (an important and complicated feeder to the Midwest among other things), but two articles touch immediately on our area of focus:

The regular feature "Diaries at NEHGS," by archivist/editor Robert Shaw, excerpts and puts in contxt the diaries of Diadema (Bourn) Swift (1812-1888), who after enduring her husband's long absences on whaling voyages, after his death emigrated to Benton County, Indiana, and then to Des Moines, Iowa, in hopes that her sons would not follow the sea.

Jim Boulden takes on a difficult task in "Betting on Land in Missouri: A Family Story" -- chronicling his Ely and Hyde ancestors' rarely investigated pioneering of Marion, Alexandria, and St. Francisville in northeastern Missouri (just across the Mississippi River from Illinois). Previous family genealogists ignored failure and defeat, and it can be difficult to research when the records were lost with the enterprise. But a family history that is all good news is unfaithful to the reality of our ancestors' lives.

Sanborn fire insurance maps on line

If you don't have access to a university library, you won't find too many of these fanatically detailed and carefully coded building-by-building Sanborn city maps on line. There are a few exceptions that I know of (anyone able to add more to the pot?):

INDIANAPOLIS: the IUPUI collection has selected years starting in 1887.

KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI: at the Kansas City Public Library's historical collection. They list some additional states with on line access to the public.

MISSOURI: 390 communities via the University of Missouri digital library!

LINCOLN AND MARATHON COUNTIES, WISCONSIN: 54 pieces of maps near railroad lines, part of the Central Wisconsin Digitization Project.

Most of the time, most researchers who recognize the extreme value of these beauties will have to proceed the old-fashioned way and get themselves to a good library.

UPDATE: The Newberry Library blog has posted numerous online links for these maps!

The Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio Rivers Frontier

It's not obvious from the title, but Stephen Aron's American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006) is part of the series including Frontier Indiana, Frontier Illinois, The Ohio Frontier, and The Wisconsin Frontier. Aron recognized that the story starts, not with what-later-became-the-state-of-Missouri, but with the important confluence of rivers from the Missouri-Mississippi down to the Mississippi-Ohio, and surrounding territory.

One key theme here is a rethinking of the frontier and white-Indian relations based on Richard White's wonderful 1991 classic The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815. None of the governments or tribes that purported to rule the proto-Midwest had power to make their wishes law in day-to-day life, so what actually happened was the result of local negotiations and creative misunderstandings among different cultures. As long as European states and empires competed for the land, Indians had room to maneuver and play one group off against another. After the War of 1812, however, they had only one country to deal with, and its white inhabitants rarely respected other races (although comparatively enlightened leaders like Meriwether Lewis and William Clark tried to do so). Time and again the following pattern was repeated:

Lured again by exuberant descriptions of the region's fertility, increasing numbers of squatters entered the supposedly off-limits area [reserved for Indians, often refugees from further east], then complained about Indian depredations and pressed the government to oust the Indians and confirm their holdings.

Even tribes that were assimilating to European ways of settled agriculture had land stolen from them in this way. Genealogist who take the word of "old settlers" about hostile Indians are likely to be seriously misled about what actually happened back then on the frontier.

St. Louis index at the Missouri History Museum

Strictly speaking, St. Louis is out of my area, but our ancestors didn't know that. Hat tip to Diane Haddad, whose Genealogy Insider blog for Family Tree Magazine calls attention to the Missouri History Museum's Genealogy and Local History Index. The index is on line, the things indexed -- mostly pertaining to St. Louis residents and businesses -- are not, but you can request photocopies. I found a reference to a potential Gedney cousin who appeared in a scrapbook on "Missourians in the European War" (that is, World War I), an eleven-volume set, the kind of thing that often doesn't get indexed.

The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia

This year a kind and generous Santa brought me The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia, an 1891-page behemoth edited by Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton. (Cayton, as faithful readers of this blog already know, wrote the wonderful Frontier Indiana.) Their "Midwest" is more inclusive than this blog's: besides Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, it includes Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and both Dakotas.

The encyclopedia's 22 chapters each contain many individual articles by expert authors with additional reading suggestions. They run from geography to small-town life to military affairs, but its index has no entry for "genealogy." It's all relevant, of course, but of particular interest to genealogists may be "Cultural Geography" (p. 145), "Peoples" (p. 177), "Language" (p. 278), and the brief sketch of "State and Local Historical Societies" (p. 654). As a fan of Cayton's "General Overview" (p. xix), I'll give him the floor:

The conquest, settlement, and development of what we call the Midwest is one of the most important events in the past quarter millennium of human history. In the nineteenth century, millions of people entered this interior region, forcibly displaced thousands of American Indians, and established a society that dominated North America and much of the globe throughout the twentieth century. This breathtaking transformation amounts to one of the most all-encompassing and significant revolutions in the history of the world. ...

The Midwest in fact is not the land of the bland, but a collection of disparate communities held together, more or less, by a civic culture that transcends (or at least ignores) differences...

Read the whole thing.

Tired of your own genealogy? Puzzle along with Craig Manson at Geneablogie, as he digs through records in Latin, French, and English along the Illinois-Missouri line in search of his Micheau/Mischeaux families.

Your ancestors felt the earth move if they were in the Midwest in 1812

The Missouri State Genealogical Association's blog reminds us of the New Madrid Earthquake -- actually four or five earthquakes -- of 1811-1812, and links to the US Geological Survey page on it (don't miss the pictures of visible damage 90+ years later).

USGS's take:

At the onset of the earthquake the ground rose and fell - bending the trees until their branches intertwined and opening deep cracks in the ground. Landslides swept down the steeper bluffs and hillslides; large areas of land were uplifted; and still larger areas sank and were covered with water that emerged through fissures or craterlets. Huge waves on the Mississippi River overwhelmed many boats and washed others high on the shore. High banks caved and collapsed into the river; sand bars and points of islands gave way; whole islands disappeared.

My take on it in the Chicago Reader when I had the chance to learn from the experts and read up on it:

Monday morning, December 16, 1811, on the Mississippi River in the village of Little Prairie, Missouri Territory. The ground rocked and rolled so hard it knocked people down. Sixteen-year-old Ben Chartier had been hanging around his family's cabin door, where his mother was having a smoke. "The sky turned green, and then it shook hard. My father and my cousins ran and turned the hogs out. The ground burst wide open and peach and apple trees were knocked down and then blowed up."...

Thursday afternoon, November 9, 1995, overlooking the Mississippi River from the William Campbell farm near Dyersburg, Tennessee. Over the years David Stewart has worked as a geologist, preacher, author, natural-childbirth activist, consultant, and entrepreneur. Most recently he's been in the business of reminding anyone who will listen that the big quake of 184 years ago will be back some day. And when it comes it could do more than just rattle your dishes off the shelf.

Campbell uses the seemingly solid sand-and-gravel hillside Stewart's standing on as a gravel pit. For Stewart it's a ready-made earthquake laboratory, where he can re-create Little Prairie's nightmare in miniature. He stamps his foot on the ground again and again. The ground begins to shake like jelly where he stamped. Water seeps up out of it, and his feet begin to sink. He stamps one last time, then jumps away a few feet. "Usually you get quicksand," he says. "But under the right saturation conditions you can even get quick gravel."

War of 1812

With characteristic generosity, the Missouri State Genealogical Association blog posts links and online resources for the War of 1812, few of which have anything to do with their state. Links include Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio sources, a Newberry Library online listing of mostly print sources for those states plus Michigan and Missouri, plus others outside our immediate coverage area.

Get your deceased relatives shaped up for the fast-approaching 200th anniversary of this conflict that shaped the proto-Midwest and put an end to Indian tribes' ability to survive by playing one government or empire off against another.

Best and worst for vital records

Check out Craig Manson's posts at Geneablogie where he lists and describes states with exceptionally good and bad policies on access to vital records. (You'll want to stay awhile for his family stories, too. Hat tip to Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings for the pointer.)

The oversimplified quick story on the Midwest is that we go to extremes: Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri are good; Iowa and Michigan are not so good; and Indiana is located in "Vital Records Access Hell." Read the whole thing for the informative details.

Missouri shows 'em how

I left Missouri out of my definition of the Midwest, but it just keeps knockin' at the door...

Surely the most active of genea-institutional blogs -- of almost any genealogical blog, for that matter -- is the MoSGA Messenger, official blog of the Missouri State Genealogical Association. Their indefatigable blogger(s?) don't just stick to the Show-Me State, and often you'll find tips here that aren't on every other blog and mailing list. Recent posts have included McPherson, Kansas; the Washington State Library's free ask-a-librarian service (I've used it, it's great); an upcoming Sisson family reunion in Springfield, Illinois; and the National Genealogical Society's recently added members-only perk of viewing recent issues of the NGS Quarterly.

Speaking of Missouri, it just became even a state I wish I had more deceased relatives in: Joe Beine's Genealogy Roots Blog reports that the ongoing indexing and digitization of state death certificates is now complete from 1910 through 1957.

When conference blogs go good

Blogs designed to promote an institution or an event tend to lack character IMHO. So I'm especially happy to report that the NGS conference blog for their big Kansas City event May 14-17 just posted more than a dozen crackerjack ideas, locations, and links for conducting Kansas and Missouri research nearby.

I have my eyes on Swiss immigrant David Joss in Buchanan County, Missouri (my gg grandfather's brother) and Stephen Cooper in "Bleeding Kansas" (my great-grandfather's first cousin). And there are others. But frankly the conference itself looks so full of learning opportunities that I don't know when I'll find time or energy to hit the repositories. Which courthouses will be open 24-7 that week?

More blogging in the act of finding ancestors

David Suddarth of Minnesota has a newish blog, Ancestral Journeys, where he tackles some tough questions having to do with conflicting evidence about his Suddarth, Stroud, and Douthit ancestors in Crawford and Perry counties, Indiana; Wayne County, Illinois; and Stoddard County, Missouri, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most perplexing is the question of when in the early 1860s Benjamin Suddarth was born, since the census and his father's pension records don't agree with each other, and of course at that date Indiana didn't keep official birth records.

I always find it useful when other folks are generous (and courageous!) enough to share their step-by-step reasoning process in these hard cases. After all, if you can find someone who's never dealt with conflicting evidence, you've found someone who hasn't seen much evidence yet!