After a fifteen-month nap (er, hiatus) I will try restarting this blog on a weekly basis.

* The big genealogy news is Karen Jones's planned retirement as editor of one of the top five US scholarly genealogy journals. Those who have worked with and for her at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record wish her the best (and longest!) retirement, with many delayed ancestors found and published.

* Speaking of the Record, I have a short article in the January issue: “‘A continual claim and struggle’: DeGrove Gleanings from the Appellate Court,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 148 (January 2017): 61-64. It's a brief addendum to William DeGrove's ongoing saga of this New York family in the 19th century.

* It's never a mistake to draw up a timeline! I prepared one just to cut out a lot of boring text in a family history. It showed some interesting connections and unexpectedly provoked more city directory research, leading to some original records that may shed light on a Pennsylvania-Ohio family that is visible in only one census between 1860 and 1900. With luck this could be a publishable article in itself.

* GRIP may be the only genealogy institute capable of bilocation, with Deb Deal representing it at this weekend's Ohio conference and Elissa Powell doing the same in New England.

New England landscapes

Genealogists seeking historical context and information about New England's 19th- and 20th-century landscapes may want to check out a new book with 20 chapters from 20 different authors, A Landscape History of New England, edited by Blake Harrison and Richard W. Judd, geographer and historian. The transformation of essentially the same physical landscape from "failed farms" to a mecca for leaf-peepers is alone worth the price of admission.

Pilgrim history gateway

For those with early New England ancestors, this book review is a gateway to several interesting books and ideas about how unplanned and rocky the Great Migration really was.

Methodology Monday: another look at "mug books"

Those old county histories have always been a bit dodgy sources for genealogy -- requiring vigilance at least, and a realization that they left out those who couldn't afford listing -- but there is also good reason not to take their history without several grains of salt.

A new book from the University of Minnesota Press (not seen by me, said to be due out in March or April) goes into this in some detail. In Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, historian Jean M. O'Brien drew on "more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880" whose authors "insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England's original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled."

Half as many kids 1790-1840

There is a school of thought among some genealogists that one ought not to write about things that would have embarrassed one's ancestors if they were alive to hear or read it. If you are in that school, you should definitely not betake yourself to a good library (or this link) and you should definitely not read historian Gloria L. Main's article "Rocking the Cradle: Downsizing the New England Family," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37(1):35-58, published in 2006.

OK. Now for the rest of us: like most scholarly articles, this one is part of an ongoing conversation and is very condensed in style (especially as to statistical methods). And so it's always hazardous for a newcomer and non-historian to jump in and quote, because I may not be able to distinguish between what Main says that is new to the conversation and what is old hat, or between the accepted facts and her new and less fully accepted ideas. (Also I don't know if the conversation has advanced in the subsequent four years.) But it is a conversation genealogists might want to have an ear on.

The fact is that New England families average only about half as many children in 1790-1840 as they had before. The mystery is how and why. Main writes,

Ordinary families living in New England's countryside who avoided or terminated pregnancies did so without the aid of any new contraceptive technology or medical knowledge. ... it was far more difficult to prevent babies in the New England of 1800 than it is today in Bangladesh.

She draws on the rich well of New England vital records and family histories, noting that "The best of them have been refereed by professionals and published by reputable presses." She also has some interesting things to say about them that affect both their genealogical and historical value: "Since male heads of large households generated longer paper trails, genealogies are inevitable biased toward large families iwth many male descendants." Of course there's also the Revolutionary-era decline in record-keeping and increase in mobility. But "under-recording of births and deaths, especially of females, by town clerks in New England occurred from the outset." She's got the numbers.

Main also has a detailed discussion of the few ways that New Englanders could have limited their family size. For this venue, suffice to say it was not easy or fun. So why did they do it? The statistics she marshals do not suggest that children had become an economic burden, but they may have become a time burden. Fewer babies do correlate with less farming in a county as of 1820, and also with more meetinghouses and libraries than average. Main's suggestion:

Since women outnumbered men in church membership in early New England and were better educated and more politically aware than ever before, rising female status within the family may explain the greater willingness of men to cooperate in helping their wives avoid pregnancy.

Another source for local histories online

You haven't felt true research despair until you get a ten-pound leather-bound county history and biography from, say, 1880, plopped on your library table. No index. No system. No useable table of contents -- but somewhere inside those gold-tipped pages there might be a biography, or even just a passing mention, of your ancestor (at least if he was male, respectable, settled, and cooperative with the company then churning the books out).

Nowadays, the main problem is keeping up with all the different places you can find these potential genealogical treasures every-word searchable on line -- better than an index! The large and growing web site Rays Place ("Explore New England's Past") by Ray Brown includes township-level histories for New England states, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan. Michigan is new (hat tip to MoSGA Messenger).

I looked at Clyde Township, Allegan County, Michigan -- home to Fennville, now an up-and-coming art and foodie colony -- and compared Ray's rendition of its published 1880 history with that offered by Michigan County Histories.

MCH has more histories, and you can search across them all; it also has images of the original pages. But to get to Clyde Township you have to do some searching within the overall 1880 volume.

Ray has transcriptions (with the occasional typo) and no page numbers, but you can get right to the individual town's history if you know which one you want.

For professional-type citation purposes MCH would be preferable. Ray offers additional services in providing links to GenWeb and Linkpendium information for each county, a real bonus if you don't know those sites already.