Mark the Calendar: Amy Johnson Crow in South Bend April 13

Two talks by a highly qualified speaker will be handy to genealogists in northern Indiana and southern Michigan in April.

Saturday, April 13, at the Colfax Auditorium in the main St. Joseph County Public Library at 304 South Main Street in South Bend, Amy Johnson Crow will speak on researching our Civil War ancestors:

10 am: “Answering the Call: Researching Civil War Ancestors Before and During the
War,” and

11:30 am: “Discharged: Researching Civil War Ancestors After the War.”

The talks are co-sponsored by the library and the South Bend Area Genealogical Society.

Amy Johnson Crow, MLIS, CG, is a Genealogical Content Manager with Archives.com. She is a researcher, author, editor, and database developer. She is a former editor of the Ohio Civil War Genealogy Journal.

Mid-20th-century war resource

The St. Joseph County (Indiana) Public Library has an on-line "Service Notes" database indexing almost 40,000 newspaper mentions of local people "who were being drafted, entering the service, being promoted or sent to different locations" between 1941 and 1979. It's in two parts, one for WWII, the other for Korea and Vietnam. Each can be browsed if you specify how to sort the list and a particular branch of service. The results will give name and address, but any underlying newspaper items must be retrieved from either microfilm or clipping files in the library in South Bend.

Obviously this sort of database is just a start on research, and equally obviously it won't help if your person of interest came from somewhere else. But check your relevant library -- they may have a similar card file or index that hasn't made it on line yet!

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.

Blogs, Maps, and Forgotten Bookmarks in South Bend

FYI, the St. Joseph County Public Library's Family and Local History Section has had its own newsletter (PDF) for the last few months. In addition to their catalog, they have on line listings of genealogically useful holdings, including their maps (anyone for an 1838 street map of South Bend?) and research guides for those seeing Eastern European or Irish homelands.

The library also has an online database of locally published obituaries from 1913 to the present of people with ties to St. Joseph County, Indiana. (Print indexes of earlier obituaries are available.)

And that's not all, folks! One of the spookiest blog posts I've seen in a while was on the library's main SJCPL blog last month, featuring a bookmark from 1960 that turned up in a library book. Of course it's been entered as well on the web site (you knew there was one) called Forgotten Bookmarks. Yes, history can jump out and bite you!

St. Joseph County Indiana library

The New England Historic Genealogical Society's e-News for 4 June (not up on their site yet but free signup even for nonmembers) has an appreciation of South Bend's St. Joseph County Public Library, including its digitized version of the 1875 county historical atlas, the 1936 plat book for the agricultural parts of the county, the county obituary index from 1913 forward, and a 1941-1979 database of local military service. (I can testify that the physical space is nice too.)