Happy Holidays from the St. Joseph County Public Library!

The November-December newsletter from the St. Joseph County (Indiana) Public Library's Local History and Genealogy Services arrived before the 25th, but I didn't. Fortunately this is a gift without an expiration date, especially for those with "Michiana" research targets. Sara Allen compiled a list of area libraries' on-line obituary databases:

South Bend (St. Joseph County IN) 1913-present
Bremen (Marshall County IN) before 1997
Elkhart (Elkhart County IN) 1921-present
Michigan City (La Porte County IN) 1887-present
Niles (Berrien County MI)
Plymouth (Marshall County IN) 1922-1979
Wakarusa (Elkhart County IN)

You can google the public libraries in question, or hang on until this issue of the newsletter is up at the above site. More on Elkhart County in a later post.

Methodology Monday with multiple records

Midwestern newspapers in the 1850s were a sorry lot, genealogically speaking: weekly, four pages, half ads (few of which changed from week to week), the other half mostly boilerplate copied from other newspapers or the federal government. Local news was mainly court-required publications of notice of pending cases.

Thus the Niles (Michigan) Enquirer for November and December 1856, which I had occasion to read last week. In its last eight issues of that year, it took note of a grand total of six marriages. One involved a former resident who got married in Tennessee; another involved a couple from Racine, Wisconsin. The other four marriages were local:

16 November, R. J. H. Beall and Eleanor A. Weever (27 November issue, p. 3 col. 2)
23 November, Alfred L. Wood and Rhoda J. Fowler (27 November issue, p. 3 col. 2)
7 December, E. R. Griswold and C. Chapman (18 December issue, p. 3 col. 1)
16 December, Francis J. Hadlock and Mary Snorf (18 December issue, p. 3 col. 1)

Of course, the marriage I was actually looking for wasn't there, even though I had obtained the original record of it from the holdings of the Berrien County Historical Association a while back. How about these folks?

To my amazement, not one of these four marriages is in the BCHA collection, and only one of them (Beall-Weaver) is in the Family History Library's microfilm of the records of the County Clerk. Unless they appear in ministerial or church records, this scrap of ancient newspaper looks to be the only record of these marriages. I never would have found them at all without some sleuthing help from Sharon Carlson, director of the Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History collection in Kalamazoo. She found two years of the Enquirer, unlabeled, at the back of a microfilm there.

Don't imagine, as I did, that those newspaper marriage notes are merely a subset of the official marriage records that might contain an extra tidbit of information. They may just be your last best hope.

Silverbrook Cemetery in Niles, Michigan

NEHGS e-News highlights an active cemetery restoration group in Niles, Berrien County, Michigan, the Friends of Silverbrook Cemetery. The group's stated mission is "to promote and restore Silverbrook Cemetery to its once proud heritage."

For distant genealogists, their database -- searchable by surname, given name, cemetery section, birth date, death date, burial date, or funeral home -- is a gift (as is its property of being searchable by the first few letters of a name if you're not sure of exact spelling). Its 19,494 listings are said to constitute "most" of the burials. It's not clear whether the database is derived from a cemetery reading, a record of burials, other data, or some combination -- probably some combination, as few gravestones name the funeral home.

The website also includes upcoming meeting dates, a roster of members, and a photo gallery.