Was Your Ancestor Entered in a Better Baby Contest?

The Ultimate History Project has a brief interesting article on the mixed heritage and results of Better Baby Contests that were all the rage just about a century ago. Babies were weighed and scored on a number of supposedly scientific criteria; often there was an anti-immigrant or anti-black subtext to the movement at a time when eugenics had not yet become a dirty word.

But genealogists devour everything. These contests are another potential source of information, as contestants and winners were sometimes pictured and identified in local newspapers. The above article about a Missouri contest appeared in the Quincy (Illinois) Daily Journal in 1915 -- thanks to the Quincy Public Library's awesome newspaper archive. I have seen BBCs with pictures spread across an entire page of a small-town newspaper.



Rachel Louise Moran, "Making Perfect Children," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/better-babies.html : accessed 25 March 2013).

"Additional Awards in Palmyra Round-Up," Quincy Daily Journal, (Quincy, Illinois), Thursday 23 December 1915, p. 8; digital image, Quincy Public Library Newspaper Archive (http://www.quincylibrary.org/library_resources/newspaperArchive.asp : accessed 26 March 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Was Your Ancestor Entered in a Better Baby Contest?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Ultimate History Project

The Ultimate History Project calls itself  "a forum for academically trained historians to work alongside avid genealogists, independent historians, and collectors, enabling them all to collaborate and learn from one another." Clearly it grows in part from the increasing numbers of unemployed and underemployed historians.


The site is a partial-pay site, set up so that new articles are free for a time, then go behind a pay wall -- so if you keep up you can read it for free. Among my favorites in the current crop are

* an interview with National Park Service chief historian Robert Sutton about the history of Civil War anniversaries (Congress created a national Centennial Commission in 1961; no such animal today);

* a quick history of cheerleading by Allison E. Wright (women weren't allowed); and 

* a perfectly Midwestern account of ornate buildings decorated with corn murals by Kelly J. Sisson Lessens
("The goal for those who led the Corn Palace craze was to advertize their city as the next Chicago"). 

The articles are accessible, short enough to be easily read on screen, and well illustrated. They're thoughtful, but contain no reference notes (which apparently may be available on request).

I haven't seen any recognizably genealogical posts...yet. Will yours be the first?

{P. S. Next day: forgot to include a hat tip to AHA Today's "What We're Reading."}



"Remembering the Civil War: An Interview with Robert K. Sutton, PhD," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/civil-war.html : accessed 15 July 2012).

Allison E. Wright, "Games People Played: The Elite, Masculine Origins of Cheerleading in America," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/games-people-play-may.html : accessed 15 July 2012). 

Kelly J. Sisson Lessens, "Thoroughly Corned: Sioux City and the Making of the Nation's First Corn Palaces," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/taste-of-history-may.html : accessed 15 July 2012).



Harold Henderson, "Ultimate History Project," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]