Methodology Monday with Tony Burroughs

Chicago's own Tony Burroughs has a nice post at AC360. Much of it pertains to the stringent methodological requirements of doing African-American genealogy successfully, and one part should be required reading for all genealogists:

Many are unaware of the vast amount of records that exist, and the scarcity of those that are digitized or even catalogued. One institution alone, the National Archives, has only 125,000 scanned images on their website out of 4 billion documents in their collection. That’s one page for every 34,000 documents.

Very crudely put, your odds of finding what you're looking for on the internet alone: 33,999 to 1.

Sandusky History

The Sandusky History blog is "inspired by the collections of the Sandusky Library Archives Research Center and Follett House Museum," and produced by the Sandusky Library Archives Research Center. Recent posts have covered a Feb. 9 appearance (woops! that's tomorrow!) by the distinguished genealogist and lecturer Tony Burroughs of Chicago State University; an 1830s autograph album belonging to Marcia Coburn Vinton of Massachusetts, whose daughter was a pioneer Sandusky settler; the 1924 life story of former slave Sophronia Jefferson; and the tradition of Leap Year parties. Thanks to Dorene Paul for alerting me to this one, as my forebears seem to have skipped that part of Ohio.