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.

Resources: Akron, Ohio City Directories .... and vaccines

There's a potato chip that used to have the slogan: "You Can't Eat Just One."

The same should be true for genealogists checking out city directories: "You Can't Read Just One." That's why I'm so pleased to learn that the Akron-Summit County Library Special Collections has digitized about 100 Akron city directories from 1858 to 1969.

"Selected years" just doesn't cut it, because in any given year people were missed or misspelled, or an extra tidbit of information about their workplace, spouse, or death might have been included. Those with Summit County research targets should think of this, not as 100 separate volumes, but as a movie of Akron people with each volume a single image. You can't get the good out of a movie by watching a single still. Enjoy!

(Hat tip to Chris Staats on Facebook)

For your context file: The AHA Today newsletter points to a well-documented site from The College of Physicians of Philadelphia on The History of Vaccines, including a history of anti-vaccination movements in the colonial US, Victorian England, and more recently.

More Midwesterners in NYGBR

For those who enjoy national-level publications -- but enjoy them even more when they contain Midwesterners! -- the October issue of The New York Genealogical and Biographical Record (vol. 142, no. 4) includes the second and final installment of Dawne Slater-Putt's "John and Elizabeth (Halbert) Blair of Ontario and Yates Counties, New York." Descendants of theirs are identified in Michigan (Lapeer and Wayne counties), Ohio (Williams, Portage, and Summit counties), and Illinois (Henry County) -- as well as in the California Gold Rush.

Barberton Births and Deaths 1938 forward

A link on the Akron-Summit County Public Library website led me to this online index of relatively recent vital events in Barberton, just southwest of Akron in Summit County, Ohio. It's a work in progress of the Barberton Health District (includes Norton) with records being entered monthly, and eventually to be entered back to 1909. (Although at one point the database is said to cover only up to 2001, I found an entry for 2003.)

Separate search engines for births and deaths work similarly. The main engine works only if you enter first name, last name, and full event date. You can select a secondary engine that will produce all results for a given surname. Otherwise, no browsing, but this is still a partial local substitute for censuses not yet available. Search results may include both parents' full names. You can crown a successful search by ordering an official (certified) birth or death certificate for $27 through VitalChek.

Akron City Directories 1859-1969!

The Akron-Summit County Public Library Special Collections has done several wonderful things in digitizing Akron city directories. The most wonderful thing is that they did it at all, making this great research tool available to those who no longer live conveniently in northeast Ohio. But that's not all the goodness by any means. Let me count the ways:

First, they did them all or almost all (1911 and 1916 are still on the way), not skipping or selecting years. (The earliest is a partial edition from 1859; the latest is 1969. In between they have most years including a complete run 1877-1910.) Yearly coverage is critical for researchers just as it was for contemporaries. It enables us to confirm family members' presence, location, and occupation; even if they don't move (and most people rented and moved almost every year), their occupation may change or be described differently or include the employer's name. Unlikely-looking listings can be double-checked and perhaps confirmed in adjacent years. Family linkages may be suggested if people circulate through the same addresses in different years.

Second, they put each one in PDF format, making it easy to browse from one page to the next just as if browsing the physical book -- unlike Footnote's city directories, which often interleave two or three directories from the same year (with several "page 35" entries in a row), and sort the unnumbered pages strangely.

Third, they made them every-word-searchable with OCR (subject to the limitations of faded pages and worn type), so that the diligent researcher can pursue neighbors by searching on street names and numbers even in the absence of a criss-cross directory.

This is the best online city directory collection I've seen yet -- if you have nominees from elsewhere I'd love to see 'em. I'll be burrowing into my database, hoping to find some research targets who lived in or near Akron. (Hat tip to Kelly Holderbaum for pointing it out!)