Underhill, Chittenden County, Vermont, on FamilySearch -- and other odd partial indexes

In order to use the relevant part of the FamilySearch collection of Vermont town records -- specifically those from Underhill, Chittenden County -- I have ascertained where the various volumes begin. This collection is browse-only, not indexed. But finding where individual volumes begin and end can make the browsing process far more efficient.

Volume 1, page 1 = image 13 of 649. It is preceded by some handwritten notes, and followed by a table of contents covering the first 64 pages of volume 1. This includes minutes of the first town meeting in 1795.

Either volume 2 is continuously paginated with volume 1, or it is missing.

Volume 3, cover = image 193 of 649. Reportedly 1805-1810.

Volume 4, cover page = image 286 of 649. Reportedly 1808-1814.

Volume 5, page 1 = image 476 of 649. Reportedly 1815-1820. Last entry is February 1820.

Several other off-the-beaten-path indexes are on Midwest Roots: a FamilySearch file of Allegany County, New York, probates; the 1857 assessor's list for Porter County, Indiana; and microfilmed small-town directories from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Since there are no in-book indexes, this is all browsing all the time. I have so many relatives here that I'm just working backwards from the end of volume 5 and have already found some goodies. It appears that most items are deeds. (Volume 1 may be more variable.) There is at least one tax list.

Someday no doubt there will be an every-name index to this collection, but I don't think it would be wise to wait!

Nine indexes and finding aids on the web site

Continuing our holiday observance of free, here are five indexes and four finding aids available in full for your consultation at Midwestroots.net:

INDIANA

1857 Porter County, Indiana, Assessor's Book (all townships)

1902-1933 Indiana small city directories on microfilm; where to find specific cities and years on 5 otherwise unlabeled films, Adams County to Winchester.

List of Indiana newspapers available at the Mishawaka Heritage Center.

Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne: The Genealogist's Unofficial One-Stop Guide to the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center

ILLINOIS

1902-1933 Illinois small city directories on microfilm: where to find specific cities and years on 12 otherwise unlabeled films, Addison to Winfield.

MICHIGAN

1902-1935 Michigan small city directories on microfilm: where to find specific cities and years  on 7 otherwise unlabeled films, Allegan to Sturgis. 

MIDWEST
List of Midwestern city directories available on microfilm at the Valparaiso Public Library.

NEW YORK

Estate Papers 1807-1930, Box 2, Allegany County, New York, indexed by name and initial image number as found in the FamilySearch collection, “New York, Probate Records, 1629-1972.” These would be deaths in the 1830s and 1840s.

FHL MICROFILM

FHL microfilms already in the Midwest, including a listing by number of those held at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.



Harold Henderson, "Nine indexes and finding aids on the web site," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

More Indiana repositories en route to FGS 2013

[Cross-posted from the FGS 2013 blog with one typo corrected.]

Unless you fly in, you will travel through Indiana on your way to or from the 2013 FGS conference in Fort Wayne. Indiana is the only state I know of with two high-quality general genealogy magazines, and, as this suggests, the state is also full of local societies and libraries with valuable holdings. Here's a sampling, and we could run several lists like this without running out.

Willard Library
21 First Avenue, Evansville
Tri-state resources for Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, plus an alleged ghost . . .
http://www.willard.lib.in.us/

Friends Collection and Earlham College Archives
Richmond
Extensive manuscript collections and genealogies for Quaker families and meetings.
http://library.earlham.edu/ecarchives or investigate the Willard Heiss Collection list on line.
This is one of several colleges and universities with relevant genealogy material.

Porter County Public Library
This might be the best genealogy library in northern Indiana if Fort Wayne weren't there too! Good periodical selection.
103 Jefferson Street, Valparaiso
http://www.pcpls.lib.in.us/genealogy.html

Marshall County Historical Society
123 North Michigan, Plymouth
A half-block of downtown stores repurposed as a history museum and research center, with
indexes, original records, and knowledgeable helpers.
http://www.mchistoricalsociety.org/ and see also http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~inmarsha/

Alameda McCullough Research Library
1001 South Street, Lafayette
In the Frank Arganbright Genealogy Center. An extensive collection focused on Tippecanoe County.
Admission fee. Check site for hours.
http://www.tcha.mus.in.us/library.htm

Records in Unpredictable Places

One more thing probate records do: make unexpected connections between unexpected places in unexpected ways.

The largest county in the Midwest -- Cook County, Illinois -- is also a burned county. While abstracting probates three counties away in Indiana, I came across three pages copied from pre-Fire Cook County probate court records from the 1840s. The originals turned to ash in the Great Chicago Fire 141 years ago.

These records connect two early Midwestern movers and shakers. Micajah Terrell Williams -- an Ohio politician-entrepreneur with an interest in improved transportation and a founder of Milwaukee, Wisconsin -- had died in Cincinnati. William B. Ogden, Chicago's first mayor and a transportation leader cut from much the same cloth, was making a claim on Williams's estate. Following Williams's death, Ogden had been involved with land Williams had owned in (among other places) La Porte and Porter Counties in Indiana. Williams's probate appears to have been a tangled and lengthy affair, and there may be more to the story.

Only because a wealthy Cincinnatian invested in some Indiana farmland did a bit of long-gone Chicago history survive the fire in this courthouse 60 miles away. This piece of history will be a lot easier to find once we get these probates abstracted and indexed!


Micajah T. Williams estate no. 336, loose papers, La Porte County, Indiana; microfilm E-1, County Clerk, La Porte.

Harold Henderson, "Records in Unpredictable Places," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Common source vs. obscure source SMACKDOWN!

In the course of a volunteer local abstracting project, I recently came across the roster of 71 individuals who bought items at the estate sale of Valentine Cattron in early October of 1840 in La Porte County, Indiana.

I was thinking what an obscure record this is. Many people do genealogy for years without going near a probate file (yes, I was one of them). By contrast, everyone uses the census, early and often. And -- hmmmm! -- this obscure record, buried in a microfilm reel of loose papers in a probate case, was created only a few months after the 1840 census.

One way -- by no means the only way -- to evaluate a source or a research tool is what it can find for us. Did the 1840 census pick up everyone who attended that sale? Or can this obscure sale list expand our reach? Why not find out? (Note that the timing of this test favors the census; an 1845 sale of similar size might well catch even more people not in the county for either 1840 or 1850.)

After working the Ancestry.com census index and reading through two counties (the deceased, like every other ancestor, lived near a border), and very conservatively counting everyone who was doubtful as "identified," I still ended up with sixteen individuals who bought at the sale but who were not enumerated in the 1840 census.

16 missing out of 71 is 22.5 percent. Call it one out of five. That's a lot, especially if your guy is one of them. That's a reason to index or abstract those sources and make them available, and to use them when you can. (There are other reasons, but that'll do for today.)

BTW, we can crowdsource this if anyone has the leisure time. The sixteen purchasers who do not appear in the 1840 census in either Porter or La Porte counties, according to me, are James P. Cain, Isom Campbell, Hezekiah Cattron, John Eaheart, Edward Evans, Wm. Lynn, Daniel Mahony, Daniel Main, Samuel Maine, James McCord, Samuel Parkinson, John Pattee, Wm. Petro, E. J. Simmons, Edwin A. West, and Daniel Wooley. Let me know if you find any of them -- or if you've wondered where they were hiding in 1840!

(A good word for Ancestry.com's indexing, too: I did find one individual in the read-through who I had missed when working the index, but I think I should have been able to find even him by creative searching.)

Why would they be missing at census time? Most, I suspect, were "hidden" in relatives' households, because only household heads were named in 1840. Some were probably elsewhere in June but not in October. And perhaps some were missed, or fell victim to bad handwriting and random spelling.


La Porte County, Indiana, estate no. 160, Valentine Cattron, sale record 1-2 October 1840, loose papers; microfilm E1, 48th item on roll, County Clerk, La Porte.

Harold Henderson, "Common source vs. obscure source SMACKDOWN!" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New on-line resources

On the Porter County, Indiana, Genweb:

917 records from the Indiana Adjutant General's List of Porter County Civil War Soldiers

11,364 individuals residing in Lake Porter counties in 1916, with their addresses and credit ratings

From the St. Clair County, Illinois, mailing list:

Diane Walsh calls attention to the free online 1926 volumes by Isaac D. Rawlings in the Internet Archive, The Rise and Fall of Disease in Illinois, volume 1 and volume 2. Much of the book culls old medical journals for reports of diseases in specific places and times. With some effort it may be possible to retrieve copies of the original articles themselves for an unusual close-up on your location of interest. He covers the whole state and some adjacent counties as well if they happened to be written up by an Illinois physician.

June 2010 Indiana Genealogist

The latest issue of Indiana's genealogical quarterly, under new editor Laura Pinhey of Bloomington, has two records-based articles by Meredith Thompson, one on delayed birth records (a potential resource for births 1860-1930) with a list of counties whose records have been microfilmed and identifiably labeled by the Family History Library, the other on using probate records as a good substitute for vital records. Dawne Slater-Putt offers some clippings from Kokomo newspapers 1919-1941 on the city's minor-league offerings in the old Negro Leagues of baseball. The issue is available on line in PDF format to members.

Twenty of the issue's fifty-four pages are devoted to lists: members of the Indiana State Teachers Association attending the 1882 annual meeting in Indianapolis, and male inhabitants of Liberty (1937) and Morgan (1943) townships in Porter County. Of course, back in the day it was essential for state and local publications to print these sorts of lists, but they look like dinosaurs in the age of online databases. The Indiana society is a national leader in posting databases on its web site, now up to 288 (with more quite possibly added since this was written); these would have fit there perfectly well.

If more of us Indiana members had produced articles about our research, they could have occupied that space in the quarterly, added to its value, and been eligible for a $500 prize. Can we crowd the editor's mailbox?

Find FHL Films Locally

Note to northwest Indiana researchers: before you spring for $5.50 to borrow a film from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, check out this listing of FHL films on "extended loan" to the Valparaiso Family History Center. You too can cause an "extended loan" by borrowing a film three times in a row. This is a nice listing in that it fully enumerates individual items within each film.

The little archive that could -- Calumet Regional Archives, Indiana

The lone archivist of the Calumet Regional Archives, Steve McShane, spoke to my local (La Porte County) genealogical society earlier this week. CRA is housed in the library at Indiana University Northwest, just off I-94 on Broadway in Gary. Its holdings focus on Lake and Porter counties (with spillover into Michigan City on the east and South Chicago on the west), and on the 20th century because that's when heavy development and population came to the area.

Almost any records can be of genealogical interest, but McShane highlighted employment records for Gary Screw & Bolt and for Pullman-Standard, as well as some land and mortgage records for 19th-century Lake County.

"The poor man's Harvard"

You may be missing a research resource if you don't know what Valparaiso University was called before 1906. VU's special collections and archives hold records and pictures going back to the founding of the Valparaiso Male and Female College by Methodists in 1859, and its resurrection as a proprietary institution, the Northern Indiana Normal School and Business Institute in 1873. The NINSBI was marketed as an affordable school, hence the promotional nickname. It became Valparaiso College in 1900, took on the current name in 1906, and became a Lutheran institution in 1925.

The archives include commencement programs from 1869, student transcripts 1919-1969 and some ledger books before that, university catalogs 1875-1918 (medical, dental, and pharmacy had their own), some 6000 pre-1925 alumni cards now in the process of being digitized, yearbooks from 1905, student newspapers (the Torch) from 1914, and more. None of these collections is complete and indexes are few; if you think maybe your research target attended school in the area somewhere, sometime, this is not the place to start a fishing expedition. The institution included a high school and a preparatory school, whose records are included. Also a century ago it seems to have been attracting a surprising variety of students from overseas, including Korea and Russia.

(Hat tip to special collections librarian Judith Kimbrell Miller's presentation to the La Porte County Genealogical Society.)

Porter County, Indiana Genweb's new look

In northwest Indiana, Porter County GenWeb has a new address and searchable obituary transcriptions (with full citations available), biography transcriptions (so far from the 1882 and 1894 mug books mostly), and Pearl Stoner Johnston's abstracts of wills and probates 1839-1880. Steve Shook is the coordinator. More is promised, including plat maps.