Joel Thrall is back . . .

. . . in the fall issue of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register for the second and concluding installment, now visible to NEHGS members on line at American Ancestors and to patrons of good genealogy libraries.

His unlikely trajectory -- from pioneer/fugitive from justice to farmer to teacher to doctor to an early death in 1827 -- is not quite complete yet. His great-grandchildren scattered across the continent, but they had to be cut from the journal for space reasons. They will appear, most likely on line, in good time -- as will Joel's dozens of nieces and nephews. He was the oldest of ten children, all of whom have multiple descendants.


" 'Faultless Could I Love Him Less?' Joel S. Thrall and His Descendants in Vermont, Quebec, Ohio, and Texas," parts 1 and 2, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 172, Summer 2018:248-56, Fall 2018:341-52.

Did your ancestor get sent off with a 35-line memorial poem?

My great-grandfather's oldest brother, Joel Thrall (1792-1827), went from Vermont to Quebec to Ohio, where he died outside of Columbus, leaving behind him a mysterious widow (wife #3), a trail of bad debts, a skeleton (in addition to his own), and a 35-line memorial mourning poem.

I knew nothing of this when I set out to write him up. (Beware those dull-seeming relatives!)

The first part of his story is now out in the summer issue of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, AKA The Journal of American Genealogy. The second and last part (scheduled for fall) follows Joel's son Homer (with wife #1), who became a Methodist missionary in Texas and a Confederate apologist, and his daughter Rachel (with wife #2), whose grandchildren are scattered across Canada and the U.S. She is the source of all of Joel's living descendants, but he was not present at her christening. It seems unlikely that she knew him, but she and half-brother Homer probably met when he paid a flying visit to Quebec in later life (1884).

FYI would-be writers: The Register is not all New England all the time; it is interested in out-migrations as well.

Two New 2018 Publications

Not everyone gets to be named Alissomon. She was the sister of my wife's 3-great grandfather Henry Mozley; their families emigrated together from Nottinghamshire, England, to Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1833. The Mozleys eventually spread out from Erie in many directions; Alissomon married shoemaker Joseph Harrison and their offspring stayed closer to the Great Lakes. 

My article follows them downstream in the current OGS quarterly. Ohio will have its annual conference later this week in Columbus -- it's not too late!

Working downstream in time has its benefits. Because I was also researching the more populous Mozley side, I discovered a letter from a Mozley relative briefly describing her visit to three Harrison cousins in Cleveland around 1910.

New York and Ohio members can read the new issues of their respective quarterlies on line, and not have to wait for the mail.

(Soon to come: revealing the life of a practiced deceiver.)

“Alissomon Mozley Harrison and Her Descendants in Erie and Cleveland,” Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly 58(1), 2018:49-61.

Review of  American Settlements and Migrations: A Primer for Genealogists and Family Historians by Lloyd Bockstruck, New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 14(2), April 2018: 156-57.

Simon and Elizabeth James in OGSQ

Simon James (1771-1822) could dig a grave, weave a piece of cloth, preach a good Baptist sermon -- and, when necessary, wrestle a ghost into submission. On his way from Wales to Pennsylvania to Ohio, he learned how to prosper in frontier real estate: buy land, subdivide it, and sell the subdivisions. But the formula never worked for him.

You can read more about my favorite ancestor in the Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly 57(4):353-63 (Winter 2017). (Ohio Genealogical Society members can read it on line.) He is my maternal grandfather's great-grandfather. He had thirty grandchildren and I hope to be writing about them later. His children married into the following families: Owens, Blackmer, Foos, Gosnell, Aye, Jacobs, and Thrall.

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.

Analyze or Else! guest post on BCG blog Springboard

Earlier this week I had a guest blog post on analysis on BCG's blog Springboard. Unusually, this is a blog that is edited, so hopefully this post will stand the test of time better than some others. And, yes, the editors helped make it better.

A Genealogy Christmas . . .

You didn't want to get anything done today, anyway! Good and potentially good things (I haven't looked at them all yet), moving from west to east . . .

* Chicago in Maps, cartographer Dennis McClendon's on-line collection of Chicago maps from 1834 to 2014.

* M. Susan Murnane's new book, Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society: A History of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2014), said to be "a social and institutional history of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio. The work explains the development of the court and the story of the people who worked there and of those who sought refuge in the bankruptcy court, within the context of northern Ohio's changing economy."

* Friend and colleague Amy E. K. Arner's new book, Abstracts of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, Tax Records 1815 (Berwyn Heights, MD: Heritage Books, 2014).

* Not new at all: Historian Thomas Bender's Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978): "There were apparently two populations in nineteenth-century towns, an economically successful permanent group who shaped the values and direction of social life in the town, and a floating, largely unsuccessful group. We know little about those who left nineteenth-century towns." By contrast, in his view, "in contemporary America, men and women do not so much move from one town to another as follow an advantageous career path that may take them to a number of basically incidental locations." {93} Now the successful are the floaters?!





Harold Henderson, "A Genealogy Christmas . . . ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 December 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

More Midwestern deaths on line

Joe Beine's Online Searchable Death Indexes and Records has new material for twelve lucky Midwestern counties:

Illinois: Cook, DuPage, Jackson
Indiana: Warrick
Michigan: Alpena, Emmet, Mason, Oakland
Ohio: Montgomery, Tuscarawas
Wisconsin: Oneida, Rock

Some of these are tied in with other local indexes -- take a little time to check out the others as well!


Harold Henderson, "More Midwestern deaths on line," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 July 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

More Midwestern death records news via Joe Beine

Joe Beine's Genealogy Roots Blog yesterday announced new death records on line. In the Midwest there's more for more than 8 counties in four states:

Illinois: Kane and Lake counties.

Michigan: Kent and Ottawa counties.

Ohio: Several counties added to the already excellent Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center obituary collection.

Wisconsin: Chippewa, Green, Richland, and Sheboygan counties.


Harold Henderson, "More Midwestern death records news via Joe Beine," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted    2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

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.]

Additional Midwestern death records on line!

Joe Beine has added or updated online records for 14 Midwestern (and many other!) counties at his Genealogy Roots Blog:

Illinois:  DuPage and Lee

Indiana: Allen, Clark, Howard, Jefferson, Miami, and Tipton

Michigan: Calhoun, Chippewa, Kalamazoo, and Oakland

Ohio: Mahoning

Wisconsin: Waupaca and statewide



Harold Henderson, "Additional Midwestern death records on line!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0

There's an old saying, "When you're tired of London, you're tired of life." Well, when you get tired of browsing this book, you're tired of genealogy.

Earlier this month my friend and colleague Michael Hait released the third edition of his On Line State Resources for Genealogy. It's up to 1140 pages and more than 9000 resources -- hosted at a bewildering variety of web sites, with a much deeper and different reach than the popular free and subscription mega-sites.

Contrary to the title, the book includes on-line resources at the national level including the National Archives. Some sites require sign-in. "Resources" include images of original records; derivative records (such as transcriptions and abstracts); authored works; and finding aids and indexes. As stated in the introductory material, use the finding aids and indexes and derivative sources to lead to the original records when possible.

The table of contents is arranged by state and then by repository in apparently random order within each state. A click on any entry in the table of contents takes you directly to the repository's listings, and a click on the specific repository's link takes you there.

Midwestern researchers will be interested to know that Indiana listings occupy 92 pages, Illinois 61, Ohio 46, and Michigan and Wisconsin each 14.

This undertaking is nothing less than gargantuan. And it includes resources I did not know about but should have. Still it doesn't have everything: absent are La Crosse, Wisconsin, city directories; the Monroe County, Wisconsin, Local History Room; and several name indexes available at the Chicago branch of NARA.

But as the numbers mount up this enterprise faces a deeper problem -- how to organize the resources. Not only are they proliferating daily (the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center just announced eleven new ones). Often the originating agency may be different, or in a different place, than the record itself (such as county records created and listed under the name of a state agency). Equally bothersome, it is also often difficult to discern where one repository ends and another begins, since the same collection may be reached through more than one portal. It certainly helps that this book is searchable and not in print form, but part of its value is that the resources also be rationally browseable.

This compilation is itself an essential part of a "reasonably exhaustive search" as prescribed by BCG's Genealogy Standards, but other searches need to be made both within and outside of it.

Another form of browsing is to follow the compiler's new blog featuring a resource every few days.






Michael Hait, comp., On Line State Resources for Genealogy, third edition (PDF/ebook, privately printed, 2013).


Harold Henderson, "On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]







Harold Henderson, "On Line State Records for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Daily work for boys in southeast Ohio around 1820

One way to break a Dark Age deadlock is to find a literate and gossipy neighbor who wrote things down. Even better is to find one who had his or her reminiscences published. Best of all if it's someone that you're actually related to.

When you find such a treasure, don't stop at extracting the genealogical gold (like an overseas grandfather's date of death). In fact, if you have any people anywhere in eastern or southeastern Ohio in the early 1800s, you will enjoy William Cooper Howells's Recollections of Life in Ohio from 1813 to 1840. His son was the well-known literary man William Dean Howells (1837-1920), and Howells families (with a terrifyingly small set of given names) are tangled throughout the Midwest and right back to eighteenth-century Wales. The senior Howells's lucid and astringent recollections also provide a model of style and tone for those of us likely to fall into sentimentalism or other kinds of editorializing.

As young boys, William Cooper Howells and his brother Tom plowed difficult ground with a difficult horse and not much harness:

When the corn was small [Paddy the horse] would get out of the rows and trample the corn, and when it had grown to some size he would stop to eat it in spite of all the efforts we could make with loud hallooing on my part and vigorous thrashing on Tom's part. . . . We had no buckles to the harness, and with our little hands we could not tie a knot that would stand. It was the same when we hauled wood, which we mostly did by the process called "snaking." We would tie a chain around the end of a log, and thereby drag it on the ground. If the log was small, or there was snow, we got along pretty well; but if the load was heavy, we usually had a scene of balking and harness breaking trying to my patience and unpleasant to Tom if he rode. Paddy was a safe horse -- that is, he was small, and it did not hurt any one to fall from him, and if he didn't stay in his tracks he was always to be found where there was something to eat.

In the spring of 1821 his (unnamed) uncle Howells decided to move 80 miles to an unsettled area of Coshocton County, where he could only afford to lease land. With young William's help, they took along cattle, sheep, and pigs as well as household goods and tools.

The loading up of the wagons occupied nearly the whole day of starting, and it was late in the afternoon when we mustered the cattle, sheep and pigs in the rear of the wagons. . . . To start off with such a mixed drove of animals was no trifling affair, for, though they would drive pretty well after getting used to the road and a day or two's experience, their obstinacy and contrariety at first was without parallel, and a boy to each animal was little enough. First, a pig would dart back and run like a deer till he was headed and turned, by which time the others would meet him and all have to be driven up; while in the meantime a cow or two would be sailing down a by-lane with elevated head and tail, and a breathless boy circling through a field or the woods to intercept her career . . . . We worked along till night, when we put up, about seven miles from the starting point.

Plenty more where that came from . . .





William Cooper Howells, Recollections of Life in Ohio from 1813 to 1840 (Cincinnati: The Robert Clarke Company, 1895), 82-83, 87; digital images, Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/recollectionsofl011646mbp : viewed October 2013).



Harold Henderson, "Daily work for boys in southeast Ohio around 1820," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

More good news for Ohio genealogy geeks

Chris Staats strikes again! and unearths a promising resource on Ohio legal history, which may be as complicated as its land history. Worldcat will tell you where copies exist, and the Newberry Library's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries will show the size of certain relevant territorial counties' jurisdictions.

Useful information -- not necessarily good news -- for Ohio researchers

From Chris Staats.

Interestingly false information -- a research travelogue

A certain kind of information can come in handy when genealogy gets complicated. It might be primary, secondary, or undeterminable; for this purpose it doesn't much matter. Whichever way, the information is false on its face, but when viewed in context with other information it points to a truth.

In 1916, Levinna (Reynolds) Holmes swore that she had been born in Ripley County, Ohio, 3 May 1831. (Oh yes, this is a Dark Age problem.)

She was wrong. There is no such county. There is, however, a Ripley County in Indiana. It's not far from the river and state called Ohio, and just north of Jefferson County, Indiana, where Levinna was living in 1850.

I had found her father William there in 1850 (when he was employed as a blacksmith), and in Brown County, Ohio, in 1830. But the 1840 census just did not give enough information to sort through the multiple William Reynolds in two or three states.

Now her false information prompted me to look for William in Ripley County, Indiana. Bonanza! I found two of him! Wait, that's not so good. The two Williams were both in their 30s, had apparent wives of the same age, had two apparent sons, and one apparent daughter of the right age to be Levinna. How to tell them apart?

Every entry in the 1840 census stretches across two wide pages. We rarely look at the second page. (We can't even download it from Ancestry.com because it's not indexed). Among other things it gives the number of people in each household who were involved in what were seen as the seven principal economic activities: mining; agriculture; commerce; manufacturers and trades; navigation of the ocean; navigation of canals, lakes, and rivers; and learned professions and engineers.

On one William's page, every household had someone in agriculture, nothing more.

On the second William's page, a small portion of which is shown above, every household but one was the same. The one exception was the sixth line down. William's five-person household was reported to contain one person in "manufacturers and trades." Sounds like a blacksmith to me!

Obviously the work is not done. But pending further confirmation, this and other information makes me pretty sure he's my man. And I wouldn't have made it this far if his daughter had just said "Ohio."

A similar piece of interestingly false information played a role in my June NGSQ article, "Jethro Potter's Secret" (p.111).

In both cases, what makes the misinformation useful is knowing enough about the people and localities involved to recognize two things:

(a) the information is false as stated, but

(b) when its errors are unwound it can be useful anyhow.

As a rule, the more we know, the more we can find out. This is just one more reason that it's worthwhile to look back over information collected over a period of years to find some hitherto unrecognizable diamonds in the rough.

Has IFI helped you in a genealogical quest? Have you published the results yet?






Harold Henderson, "Jethro Potter's Secret: Confusion to Conclusion in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 101 (June 2013):103-112. 
 

1840 US Census, Ripley County, Indiana, Otter Creek, p. 121, line 6, Wm. Reynolds; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : viewed 28 September 2013), citing NARA microfilm publication M704, roll 92. The other William Reynolds is at p. 85, line 20.

Harold Henderson, "Interestingly false information -- a research travelogue," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]