New online death records and indexes

Joe Beine has additional death records and indexes posted. For our five-state Midwestern focus, they are:

Illinois: Boone and Cook counties

Michigan: Ottawa County

Ohio: Cleveland



Harold Henderson, "New online death records and indexes," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Western Michigan man of mystery

The June issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly includes a switcheroo on the old genealogical chestnut of whether there was one or two or more John Does in a particular jurisdiction. Q coeditor Tom Jones takes on Charles D. McLain, David R./Daniel McLain, and D. McLain -- three (apparently) different men in 19th-century western Michigan, who he proves to be the same one! Try to read this without your head spinning, but remember that this is the kind of careful work required to trace the less prominent, less stable, and less fortunate of our ancestors and relatives.

BTW, NGS members can browse this issue and all others back through 2002 on line.

Michigan's Abrams Genealogy Seminar July 25-26

In the absence of the usual statewide genealogy organization, the Library of Michigan is a key institution holding that state's genealogy community together. It's sponsoring a day-and-a-half seminar in Lansing July 25-26 that anyone with research targets in Michigan will want to consider. Just a sampling of the topics to be covered:

• finding Revolutionary War ancestors at the Library of Michigan

• Michigan township records, "a genealogical gold mine"

• Treasures of the Archives of Michigan

• the digitization project for state death records 1897-1920

• the Local History and Genealogical Collection of the Public Library of Saginaw (PDF)

• Ceil Wendt Jensen, CG, on newspaper research

• the Local History and Genealogy Department at Loutit District Library in Grand Haven