Civilian Conservation Corps info and pictures

The Indiana Historical Society has added 150 photographs to its collection, depicting Civilian Conservation Corps camps in Jackson, Jennings, Lawrence, and Orange counties 1934-1936. The photo here is from North Vernon camp no. 1514, where the men built structures in Muskatuck State Park.

The society's web site is not terribly transparent, but more materials are available with a site search, digital image search, or library catalog search.

Many more official records of the government jobs program are at the National Archives and Record Administration, Record Group 35, with two on-line films playable here.




:Photo credit: Indiana Historical Society, CCA Photo Album collection, "Kitchen Force"; digital image
http://images.indianahistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/V0002/id/1547 viewed 20 January 2014.

"New in Collections and Library," INPerspective, January/February 2014, p. 13.

Harold Henderson, "Civilian Conservation Corps info and pictures," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 January  2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Objectors to war have descendants, too

Cindy Freed at the group blog In-Depth Genealogist calls attention to a Civil War database of Pennsylvanians whose religious convictions prevented them from accepting a draft to serve in the Union army. Her title ("Bet You've Never Researched This") may grate on those with lots of Quaker ancestors, or those from the German Brethren churches who took a similar stand. But her title does reflect an ambivalence in genealogy between honoring individual service and sacrifice in war, on one hand, and support of war in general, on the other. (An earlier post along these lines is here.)

Additional sources for more recent conscientious objectors can be found in National Archives Record Group 163, "Selective Service System (World War I), 1917-1939," and Record Group 147, "Records of the Selective Service System 1940-," and in various federal court records.





Cindy Freed, "Bet You've Never Researched This," The In-Depth Genealogist, posted 6 May 2012 (http://www.theindepthgenealogist.com/?p=6448 : accessed 6 May 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Objectors to war have descendants, too," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

They're from the Government and They're Here to Help Us

It's a great time to be a genealogist, with FamilySearch continually unrolling newly digitized records. I am so tickled that they have more than eight million images of New York State land records up!

But don't forget that other great digitizing machine, the National Archives. Keep up with them here.




Harold Henderson, "They're from the Government and They're Here to Help Us," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

$500 Scholarship to the National Institute on Genealogical Research

Those interested in attending the 2013 session of the highly regarded National Institute on Genealogical Research at the National Archives in Washington, DC, should check out the recently issued press release reprinted below. I have heard only good things about this institute, and my understanding is that winners of the scholarship are often genealogical librarians or others very active in the genealogical community. In any case, they are expected to help others with the knowledge they acquire at NIGR. The application deadline is not far off, so pass the word to your non-blog-reading friends and colleagues!


Richard S. Lackey Memorial Scholarship Available

The National Institute on Genealogical Research Alumni Association (NIGRAA) announces the
Richard S. Lackey Memorial Scholarship for 2013. This scholarship is awarded to an
experienced researcher employed in a paid or volunteer position in the services of the
genealogical community. The amount of the Scholarship is $500, which covers full tuition for
the National Institute on Genealogical Research, attendance at the Alumni Association Dinner,
and will partly defray hotel and/or meal costs.

Applications must be submitted in PDF or Word format. The completed application form and
attachments should be e-mailed to Beverly Rice at and received by
15 December 2012. The application form can be found at the bottom of the NIGRAA website at
.

The winner will be notified no later than 15 February 2013. The scholarship winner will
automatically be accepted for the National Institute on Genealogical Research (NIGR), to be
held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., from Monday, July 15 through Friday, July
19, 2013. NIGR is an intensive program offering on-site examination of federal records and is
intended for experienced genealogical researchers. Note: an application to attend in 2013 must
also be submitted to NIGR.

Membership in NIGRAA is open to anyone who has completed one or more sessions of the
National Institute on Genealogical Research or who has lectured at any session.

Remembering Rail Records -- How To Get On Track

Imagine an industry so huge that it had an office in every town of any size; that was a hub of techological innovation; that was indispensable to travel and commerce everywhere; that employed and maintained records nationwide -- some kind of hybrid of the internet and the automobile and computer industries.

That was the railroads a century ago, the grimy metallic heart of the nation. One reason we don't consult their records often is a failure of imagination -- these days trains are at best a sideshow in our lives. Another reason is that the records are scattered and in many cases have been destroyed, especially employment records. But it's still worth looking, as a recent discussion on the APG email list reminded me. (Also a hat tip to Paula Stuart Warren's blog post about the Minnesota Historical Society's good work.)

Best overviews (not necessarily best as to current record locations, all URLs as of 29 July 2012):

Wendy L. Elliott, CG(sm), "Railroad Records for Genealogical Research," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 75(4): 271-77 (available free on line to NGS members). As an overview, more thorough and authoritative than anything else linked to in this post.

David A. Pfeiffer, "Riding the Rails Up Paper Mountain: Researching Railroad Records in the National Archives," Prologue vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1997)

David Pfeiffer, Records Relating to North American Railroads, Reference Information Paper 91 (Washington DC: NARA, 2001)

Current information on Railroad Retirement Board records (for long-term employees post-1936):
RRB's two-year-old statement
NARA Record Group 184
The pension claims series within that record group

Union records such as this premier African-American union can cut across company lines:
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Chicago Division, 1925-1969, at the Chicago History Museum

The more information you can gather ahead of time on your railroad research target person, the better. It's often key to figure out which line he worked for. The sites below vary greatly and are not a substitute for Cyndi's List on railroad records. or the historical society list at RailroadData.com. The libraries and archives below often have great finding aids. The railroad historical societies often cater to modelers (the re-enactors of the train world) more than to historical research.

A good place to start is the railroad-related holdings of Chicago's Newberry Library.

Baltimore & Ohio

Burlington
Friends of BN genealogy referrals
Newberry Library holdings on this line are in process, but you can check out their blog "Everywhere West" and a photo collection. Actually I really like that blog, especially as a way to wade into the records gradually!

Chicago & Eastern Illinois 

Chicago & Northwestern Historical Society

Erie Railroad 

Great Northern records at the Minnesota Historical Society.

Illinois Central at the Newberry Library
Illinois Central Historical Society

Missouri Pacific

Monon workers index

Northern Pacific at the Minnesota Historical Society

Pennsylvania Railroad at Temple University


Harold Henderson, "Remembering Rail Records -- How To Get On Track," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]















a combo of GM/Toyota and Microsoft back in the day

This Is the Archive of Stories That Never End...

The National Archives at Chicago is a very serious repository -- no bags, no binders, no pencils, and for my money the toughest citations. It's easy to forget that it also contains enough raw story material to get a continent full of blocked novelists writing again.

Of course, that's not usually the reason we genealogists visit there. We've got specific dead people to find, not stories, but the stories often weasel their way into our negative findings. In Record Group 110, "Records of the Provost Marshal General's Bureau (Civil War)" for Indiana, I briefly encountered a good Civil War soldier who went to town with his buddies, got drunk, and was placed on a train to somewhere other than where his unit was. Having laboriously managed to get back home, get some money, and return to camp, he learned that the unit had been mustered out and he was listed as a deserter. (No, I don't know how it came out!) Check out this list of their record groups.

At my first national conference in 2008, I recall some archivists brought in a dried mole skin from the main office, but they could have brought almost any piece of paper, really. Another wonderful setting for a story emerged from the pension file of a thrice-married Michigan woman (obtained from the national, not a branch). She was the widow of a bona fide Civil War soldier, and married second a man who worked on sailing ships in the summers and in the woods in the winters. He died under obscure circumstances on the lake in the late 1860s -- no records. Decades later when she sought a pension, the question arose whether he was really dead. In their fruitless investigation, pension bureau employees beat the bushes up and down the western shore of Lake Michigan, looking for a handful of footloose aging men who had once worked the lakes when you could just go down to the dock and sign on to work a voyage. This was a world that had already vanished irretrievably by 1900.

Most of us live within reasonable driving distance of a regional archive, if not the big one in DC. Don't cheat yourself. Spend some time there getting acquainted with the people and the records (and the citations!). Chances are you'll find both stories and resources you never dreamed of. Check the out on line first, have a specific quest in mind, and call first.



Harold Henderson, "This Is the Archive of Stories That Never End...," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 19 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Thursday in Little Rock

Not necessarily representative tidbits from my day at the Federation of Genealogical Societies conference in Arkansas' cap city:

* At the opening ceremonies: Jim Hastings of the National Archives, discussing the rationale for their many partnerships in digitizing records: "Our goal is to make our information available to people who don't know we exist."

* Elizabeth Shown Mills' 7th principle for jump-starting your research: "Accept reality. Don't demand a smoking gun."

* Tom Jones: "Any source can err. Therefore, genealogical proof results only from a reasoning process, not from any record." BTW, he's still looking in the peer-reviewed genealogical literature for any example of a case in which (1) no source specifies X's parentage (or when a source specifies it wrongly), and (2) a source states that Y is not the ancestor of X, and (3) it is finally proved that Y is. This may seem like an unusual quest, and it is, but I can't explain it without recapitulating the most challenging theoretical genealogical lecture I've ever heard.

* Marie Varrelman Melchiori on military records in the National Archives: Anyone who served through 1855 could have Unindexed Bounty Land, regardless of whether they had a pension. Check it out.

* Tim Pinnick: you will not believe what hard-core genealogy information you can find in Congressional hearings. Start with the 42-volume index in most university libraries.

Methodology Monday with Tony Burroughs

Chicago's own Tony Burroughs has a nice post at AC360. Much of it pertains to the stringent methodological requirements of doing African-American genealogy successfully, and one part should be required reading for all genealogists:

Many are unaware of the vast amount of records that exist, and the scarcity of those that are digitized or even catalogued. One institution alone, the National Archives, has only 125,000 scanned images on their website out of 4 billion documents in their collection. That’s one page for every 34,000 documents.

Very crudely put, your odds of finding what you're looking for on the internet alone: 33,999 to 1.

A new motto for the Great Lakes Region National Archives

No doubt about it, the National Archives are intimidating. And it's not the kind of place to wander in and ask, "Whaddaya got?" But when you're ready with specific questions, you can start with the Great Lakes Region in Chicago. Call first and talk to an archivist.

What can you find there? Absolutely anything, and not necessarily where you expect. The National Archives' official motto is "What Is Past Is Prologue," but a case could be made for changing it to "Who Woulda Thunk It?"

An article in the Great Lakes Region's February 2009 monthly newsletter (not yet on line) describes the paper trail created when the federal government sold off its holdings on Grosse Isle in the Detroit River after World War II and hired a title company to do a search. That file included a photocopy of a 6 July 1776 treaty or deed to Alexander and William Macomb and signed by several Potawatomi chiefs:

Chief Magina's seal is an upside down deer and Chief Nanakota's seal is a fish with a very distinctive crosshatch pattern. The final pictograph, a tent, is that of Wabateathaque; his is the largest and closest to the signatures of the English.

Not just amazing, but conceivably of genealogical use if you need to confirm an 18th-century Native American identity by matching signatures. The citation is Grosse Ile Naval Air Station - Real Property Disposal Case Files. Records of the Chicago Regional Office. Accession RG 291-75A-0238-Box 25 Folder 15. Records of the Federal Property Resources Service. Record Group 291. National Archives-Great Lakes Region (Chicago).

Insurance and Bankruptcy in Chicago

Cynthia has an intriguing post over at Chicago Genealogy -- "The Chicago Fire: Was Your Ancestor Insured?" about the possibilities of using insurance records to learn more about your research targets. Interestingly, most of the materials she's found are in the Minnesota Historical Society. (Hat tip to the Newberry Library blog.)

Locally the treasure trove is at the National Archives Great Lakes Region. Bankruptcy cases are federal cases, and most Illinois-based insurers were bankrupted by the Chicago Fire (and not just because it was a big one -- they had been conducting business recklessly as well). So one entry point to insurance matters is through bankruptcy cases in 1871, 1872, and thereabouts.

One of my research targets was in the insurance business, so I had occasion to pay a very pleasant visit to NARA Great Lakes, out on South Pulaski, last summer. (None of what I say below should in any way replace your calling an archivist there before showing up -- they are very helpful, and these records are not simple to deal with. I'm not blowing smoke; check out the on line info on Record Group 21, Records of the U.S. Circuit and District Courts, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, Chicago. Learn from it, but this ain't DIY territory.)

The more you already know about your research target, the better. Using the historical index to the Chicago Tribune at ProQuest newspapers (in your better libraries) may help you latch on to a case or a company that your research target was mixed up with. Many of the bankruptcy files are not indexed. But I got good results -- YMMV -- by coming in through a side door and working my way through the early years of the Defendant's General Index to Equity & Law 1871-1911, in five volumes (so you have to look for each surname in up to five places) but on one microfilm. Many of these are bankruptcy cases, and if your luck holds you can learn a lot about your people if they're involved. But this is not an every-name index; your best shot may be to find a company that you know your people were connected with, and follow that lead.

One final repetitive caution: this is not the place to start if all you have is a name and a handful of census lookups. Get to know your people before you start in on this fascinating and rarely-taken research journey -- who they worked and lived with, who they associated with. As Tom Jones says, it's about identities, not names.

The above has to do largely with post-1871 Chicago research, but Martin Tuohy of NARA Great Lakes has a thorough and inspiring article, "Federal Court Records: Researching Hoosier Family History at the National Archives-Great Lakes Region, Chicago, 1817-1859," if you can lay hands on the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections (volume 48 issue 1), published by the Indiana Historical Society.