Miscellaneous Monday with APG PMC, Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, and technical writing tips

Getting ready to speak in Terre Haute on " 'Are We There Yet?' Proof and the Genealogy Police," so here's what's news in my world:

* This is the last week to get the early-bird price for the Association of Professional Genealogists' Professional Management Conference at the Salt Lake City Hilton January 8-9. It features presentations, workshops, and chances to meet people that you will not normally find at the big conferences -- not to mention the world's greatest genealogy library within walking distance.

Don't let APG's middle name fool you: anyone who's ramping up their genealogy but isn't necessarily interested in the business end will find plenty of value here. Those under the age of 30 will also find a discounted registration fee!

* The increasingly active BCG blog "Springboard" has a quotable visit with newly elected president Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, CG. "My journey with BCG began in the 'dark ages,' in the late 1990s . . . During the process I realized I had overestimated how 'good' I was and there was much that I needed to learn. Assembling the portfolio focused my genealogy education."

* The ever-diligent Scout Report has assembled a bouquet of items on technical writing. They tend to be focused on science, but the one that I did read through ("Sentence Structure of Technical Writing") was almost entirely appropriate for genealogy technical writing, as in the BCG portfolio requirement of a complex-evidence case study, or in the top journals in the field, or any time we're trying just to lay out our own evidence and reasoning clearly enough that we will be able to understand it when we pick up that project a few months from now. "Budget adequate time to write, review, revise and edit."



Harold Henderson, "Miscellaneous Monday with APG PMC, Jeanne Larzalere Bloom, and technical writing tips," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 November 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Good news for New York researchers!

The Internet Scout Report tells about the New York State Library's new collection of "Selected Digital Historical Documents," that is, resources for finding historical materials about the Empire State, such as laws (including revised statutes of 1829 and 1882), and a list of bibliographies and indexes of state documents. Revolutionary and Civil War holdings are also available.

Don't miss the statistical summaries of the state censuses, which have what could be backhanded information about individuals (if you can identify them) as well as contextual information on what was happening in particular towns. The Town of Amity in Allegany County, for instance, had no lunatics, two idiots (both under 21), eleven sawmills, one distillery (producing $1100 worth of distilled product), and one ashery. I have mainly used these summaries to compare my research target's land and production with the town or county average.

Also don't miss the 1981 publication that gives a full listing of questions asked each year in both state and federal censuses.

The interface here is not ideal. The above-mentioned publication places original page 43 on digital page 49, for instance.


Harold Henderson, "Good news for New York researchers!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

St. Louis Court Records from 1787 to 1875 on line -- well, some of them

The Scout Report highlights an interesting online resource for Midwestern researchers whose people of interest may have stopped and stayed awhile at the gateway to the west (and the metropolis of southern Illinois), St. Louis. It's the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project from Washington University. Cases include civil, criminal and chancery (equity) actions and are searchable by plaintiff, defendant, year, action, and case notes. Some documents are as old as 1787 and some as recent as 1875, but most are from 1804 to 1835.

This is not primarily intended as a genealogical resource, since it is not an every-name index, and since from using the search engine it would appear that the cases available are limited to those categorized as having to do with four predefined categories: Lewis & Clark, freedom suits (involving slaves or those threatened with enslavement), the fur trade, and Native Americans.

CARLI: Illinois online collections give it the old college try

Since 2006, the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois has maintained digital collections, now 75 of them on a variety of topics. You can browse them by name, by topic, by medium, or by institution.

I found a couple of alumni profiles on page 6 of The Elite Journal for 10 January 1890 (volume 3, number 15, but the earliest number so far digitized). In the class of 1875, F. H. Cumming was born in Hancock County but came to Illinois Wesleyan from Onarga, Iroquois County; Jabez Applebee was born in Whiteside County but entered college from Farmington, Fulton County.

I also found my mom's December 1943 graduation photo from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago (a framed copy of which hung on the wall of our back porch for many years).

It's worth browsing the collections just to know what's there. You can search across all collections, or search just one once you've narrowed down your focus. Once you're down to the page (or article) level, however, you're on your own.

A few of the potentially promising collections:
Benedictine University alumni directory 1887-1937,
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Civil War Collection,
Bloomington-Normal Local History Resources from Illinois Wesleyan University,
Booth Library Postcards from Eastern Illinois University,
Chicago aerial photographs from the University of Illinois at Chicago,
Great Lakes Digital Collection from the Newberry Library,
Historical Society Newsletters (Schuyler, McDonough, Hancock, and Rock Island) from Western Illinois University,
Historical Collections from Chicago State University,
Hull-House Yearbooks from 1906 from the University of Illinois at Chicago,
Letters Received by John Wesley Powell 1869-1879 from Illinois Wesleyan University,
Local History Resources from the University of Illinois at Springfield,
Noah Hart Papers (Civil War materials including the siege of Atlanta) from Dominican University,
Midwestern Railroads Documents and Images from Knox College,
The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly from 1950 from North Park University, and
William R. Townsend's Civil War Diary 1863-1864 from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Hat tip to Scout Report on the Illinois Wesleyan publications going back to January 1890.

Wisconsin Goes To War

Hey, it's Presidents' Day, and one thing presidents have a way of doing is sending people to war, whether they like the idea or not. Thanks to the Scout Report for flashing its searchlight on "Wisconsin Goes to War: Our Civil War Experience," one small part of the unfathomably large University of Wisconsin Digital Collections. At present this collection has both original and transcribed letters from Wisconsin residents involved in the Civil War, from Green County, Madison, Woodlawn, Appleton, Stoughton, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Racine, Waupun, Whitewater, Neosho, and more.

If you think I should have listed surnames instead of places, you're missing the point. Most of our Civil War ancestors either wrote nothing or nothing that survived. The trick is to find someone whose writings did survive, who shared their service in the same regiment or company, which often means they came from the same area.

Digitized newspapers in Champaign County, Illinois

If that headline doesn't make your heart go pit-a-pat, then you're reading the wrong blog! IMHO, digitized every-word-searchable newspaper images are the gold standard, and a gold mine. So it's a happy day when the Scout Report brings word of the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Right now the collection offers the UIUC student newspaper, the Daily Illini, from 1916 to 1936, with 1936-1945 promised soon; and the local daily, the Urbana Daily Courier from 1916 to 1925, with 1902-1915 and 1926-1935 promised soon.

Here's some of the tech part:

The Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection (IDNC) is a project of the History, Philosophy and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. The IDNC is a repository of digital facsimiles of historic Illinois newspapers. Using digital imaging technology, we have converted microfilmed newsprint into preservation quality image files. Equipped with Olive Software's Active Paper Archive platform, the IDNC delivers access versions of the image files through the customizable user-friendly interface. The interface allows users with internet connections to browse the newspapers by date or search by keyword across articles, advertisements and photo captions. Users can print, download, or e-mail individual articles. And it's free! We plan to add additional years of Illinois newspapers to the repository as funding becomes available.

The genealogy part doesn't need much explanation. I've already found a fascinating account of a second cousin on my mother's father's side (with the unhelpful surname Aye) who gave an impassioned speech to the local WCTU about alcoholism. He is described as a "newspaperman, and a former Methodist minister," and someone "whose experience for the past twelve years covers every phase of the evil, both from the inside and the outside." Hmmmm...