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.]

Learning about divorce

Why genealogists need to read history, even decades-old history:

Between 1867 and 1929, the population of the United States increased 300 percent, the number of marriages 400 percent, and the divorce rate 2,000 percent. By the end of the 1920s, more than one marriage in six ended in divorce every year. ...

Contradicting the assumption that more divorce meant less interest in marriage, between 1900 and 1920 the proportion of the eligible population choosing to marry rose along with the divorce rate. Moreover, the marriage age declined for both sexes.

That's historian Elaine Tyler May in her 1980 book Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America. I wish I'd known this (plus what more she has to say that I haven't read yet) when I was writing about a Wisconsin relative who got divorced around 1908! BTW, the book is largely based on divorce court cases in Los Angeles, where many Midwesterners ended up.

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.