More Online Ohio Deaths!

Collected in Joe Beine's Genealogy Roots Blog for the counties of Belmont, Columbiana, Geauga, Henry, Lorain, Stark, Summit, and Trumbull.

Midwestern Deeds Online Update

In the five-state area of our focus, I now know of a total of five counties that have historical deeds on line. (Here's my original post on the subject from June.) These are all free sites. I've improved the linkage, and DeKalb is new!

Illinois

DeKalb County via FamilySearch (browseable with indexes)

Will County via Illinois Digital Archive (indexes only, surnames A-K only)

Ohio

Cuyahoga County via fiscal officer (searchable by book and page numbers only)

Stark County via recorder (sign up, archive search, first search index by letter, then deeds by book and page)

Wisconsin

Outagamie County via FamilySearch (browseable with indexes)


These are strictly deeds, the meat and potatoes of property research -- not patents, maps, plats, or tract books. (As far as I can tell, Ancestry has nothing at all in this category.) Surely there are more!


Harold Henderson, "Midwestern Deeds Online Update," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Midwestern Deeds On Line -- More or Less!

Finding local property transactions on line isn't easy. (I'm not talking about plat maps or lists of the first landowners, but the deeds and mortgages that record all buying and selling after that.)

Many county recorders have only recent records, say the last 10-60 years, on line -- and even this limited access seems tailored for the deep-pockets crowd. Some charge $5 per search or have subcontracted the access to places like countyrecords.com and landaccess.com. (I'm not opposed to paying for on-line convenience but that seems a little steep.) Genealogy-friendly on-line access seems rare, but it can't be as rare as my unsystematic searching has found!

FamilySearch has browseable deeds for two Midwestern counties:

* Outagamie County, Wisconsin (deeds 1867-1900, indexes 1870s-1957)

* Clay County, Minnesota (deeds 1825-1901 and later in a few books; grantee indexes 1879-1901, grantor 1839-1901)

In local initiatives:

* Will County, Illinois, has searchable grantor-grantee deed indexes 1836-1885, available through the Illinois Digital Archives (offering only surnames A-K in a user-unfriendly format) or through the Plainfield Public Library site Will County: Preserving History's Heritage (only very terse transcriptions of the index).

So far, the best I've found are in Ohio's Western Reserve, where direct free access to deeds of any age from:

* Cuyahoga County, Ohio's Fiscal Officer.

* Stark County, Ohio's Recorder. Complete a simple signup, sign in, and go to "archive search."

Sometimes the best solution is to go there. On line or off, it helps to be familiar with the many indexing systems used. (In Stark County the indexes are by first letter of surname, first letter of given name, and then chronological. There are good reasons for this but for the novice it can be challenging.)

But check around first and feel free to add to (or correct) this little list in the comments!

Harold Henderson, "Midwestern Deeds On Line -- More or Less!" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Ohio Genealogy News Winter 2011

"Have You Researched Your Ancestor's Mental Health?" is the cover headline on the new OGS News, the class of the state-level newsletters. Among the contents:

Lisa Long (Ohio Historical Society reference archivist), "Mental Health Records: An Introduction for Researchers" and "Selected List of Patient Records in the Ohio History Center." Don't get your hopes up -- asylum and mental health records are "restricted" no matter how old, according to state law (insert your joke here about the lunatics running the asylum), but there are a variety of workarounds.

Deb Cyprych, "Return of Deaf and Dumb, Blind, Insane and Idiotic Persons in Ohio, 1856" -- a township-level partial census, many of the entries including parents' names.

Susan Zacharias, "Searching the Dead in Stark County: Coroner's Records Online."

Beverly R. Austin and Ronald L. Burdick, "Cleveland Public Library's Genealogy Resources."

Wally Huskonen, "Getting Ready to Research in the 1940 Census," including several tips for identifying enumeration districts as we await its indexing.

The perfect marriage: library computing and flight delays

I'm late with this, but it's too good to pass up. In her Crowe's Nest Genealogy Blog, Elizabeth Powell Crowe passes on the press release from the Akron-Canton Airport and the Stark County District Library: they installed two kiosks using PCs retired from the library and retrofitted for free public use. The airport offers free wireless already, but this way non-wireless delayed flyers may have a chance to check their email...or check out that genealogy database they've been wondering about. Now don't you wish you were flying to Akron?

Reasons to wish your ancestors died in eastern Ohio and central Wisconsin

The New England Historical and Genealogical Society eNews for 5 March (which should be archived here but doesn't seem to be) highlights two Midwestern libraries' online databases:

nearly 25,000 obituaries from the weekly Louisville Herald in Stark County, Ohio, by way of the Louisville Public Library, and

more than 200,000 newspaper records from the Marshfield [Wisconsin] Public Library, covering Wood, Marathon, and Clark counties.

A bow toward Canton, Ohio

Bloggers are supposed to be up-to-the-minute types; if we're late mentioning something we either hide it or are embarrassed. This time I'm late to the party and I don't care, because I'm so impressed with the Stark County (Ohio) District Library's index to death and obituary items in the Canton Repository, covering the years (deep breath here) 1815-1889, 1900-1955, 1957, 1961, 1963, 1966, 1978, 1979, and 2000-2004 -- so impressed that I don't mind that Karen at Ohio Genealogy told about them last September. Thanks, Karen.

Thank heavens my wife has one known relative with the good sense to die there.