Is Van Buren County Michigan's best-kept genealogical secret?

Last month I finally made it to Decatur, Michigan, home of the Van Buren District Library Local History Collection in the Webster Memorial Library and the Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society of Southwest Michigan.

Don't wait as long as I did. If you have research targets in Allegan, Berrien, Cass, Kalamazoo, or Van Buren counties, this is a must-see collection. Highlights of the collection include

• vital records, 
• newspapers from the 1850s, 
• plat books as early as 1860, 
• yearbooks, 
• Sanborn fire insurance maps on microfilm, 
• an obituary collection, 
• the Bess Britton Michigan One-Room Schoolhouse Collection, and 
• the Southwest Michigan Military Registry Project. 

If you need microfilm from Salt Lake City, you can order it sent to Decatur for viewing.

The department's rooms are packed full, and I hear there are prospects of expansion.

For more details, check out my previous posts mentioning the county or society or library.



Harold Henderson, "Is Van Buren County Michigan's best-kept genealogical secret?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Michigan School Records

Genealogy is so local. If you didn't know Michigan and needed to consult school records, you might despair. These records are often lost; if not lost, they tend to be scattered in local repositories; and if in repositories, they are rarely catalogued and even more rarely indexed.

So you would be very happy to find Archives of Michigan's five-year-old circular listing its holdings from two dozen counties, with records as early as 1843 and as recent as 1982. And if your folks happened to be around Grand Rapids a century or so ago, you'd be overjoyed to find the Western Michigan Genealogical Society's on-line index to annual school censuses of Kent County 1903-1925 (over 200,000 listings). But that's only the beginning. Lansing and Grand Rapids are good destinations, but so is Decatur.

Decatur? In Van Buren County? Population under 2000? Not even the county seat (that honor being reserved for Paw Paw)?

Yes, because Decatur is also the home of the Van Buren District Library's Local History Collection, which in turn is the home of the Bess Britton One-Room Schoolhouse Collection: eight wide-body file drawers of material covering 80 of 83 counties, 4770 schools, and 58,616 records.

I hasten to add that not all the schools have records and not all counties have equal coverage. The VBRGS blog has more information on the collection in three posts from earlier this year: part one, part two, and part three.

The collection itself is not on line, but various indexes are. For researchers who can pinpoint their family in a target county (or better, township), the geographical index may work best although it is reported to be partial. There is also a 954-page PDF available listing all the schools in alphabetical order (browseable only).

Those hoping to do a broadcast name search are not going to do so well. Ancestry.com hosts a spreadsheet of names and locations, which can be browsed or searched. As far as I have been able to tell, the browse function is slow (100 names at a time and you have to start with A), but the search function pulls up results from all of Ancestry's institutional holdings. So browsing may be the better choice. Going to Decatur may be the best.

And if you have figured out how to work around those browse and search functions, let us all in on the secret before you take off on that road trip!



Harold Henderson, "Michigan School Records," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Compulsory reading for Michigan researchers

I don't know why it took me so long to notice the Van Buren District Library Local History Collection's blog, Southwest Michigan Genealogy & Local History. The current series, "My Great-Grandfather Had Three Death Certificates!" is enough to justify the cost of admission (time only, of course) all by itself. This blog focuses on the southwest quadrant of the state but contains information of value to all Michigan researchers. Enjoy!

Got Van Buren County ancestors?

A nice set of 1906 township plat maps for Van Buren County, Michigan, is available on line through Michigan State University. If you're rusty on Michigan geography, Van Buren is the second county up Lake Michigan on the west side of the state, just north of Berrien (St. Joseph) and just west of Kalamazoo. If your research target owned land there, you can find them, but it'll be a quicker process if you know which township.

P.S. OOPS...somewhere along the line I forgot to remember to mention that my first sight of this link was over at In Deeds. Thanks!!

More Midwestern Death Records Online

Joe Beine's 1 September addition to his indispensable Online Searchable Death Indexes & Records includes new and added materials for:

Cook and La Salle counties in Illinois;

Shelby County, Indiana;

Arenac, Jackson, Monroe, and Van Buren counties in Michigan, plus an update on statewide listings 1897-1920;

Erie, Lucas, Summit, and Wood counties in Ohio; and

Marathon County, Wisconsin.

IMHO, anyone who can put their finger on Arenac County without resorting to Google ought to get a free cemetery lookup at least!

Midwestern News from New England

Valerie Beaudrault of the New England Historic Genealogical Society keeps on finding Midwestern research resources in NEHGS's eNews:

One is Worthington Memory, an "online scrapbook of Worthington history" -- so far, 1373 items from 1803 to the present from this Franklin County town. In the cemeteries database, you can choose to search Flint Road, St. John's Episcopal Church, or Union cemeteries individually or all together. The Worthington News index so far covers one full year 1812-1813, and nothing more until 1925-1942, 1950-1956, and more recent years. A link to the Worthington Historical Society leads to some information (and the chance to order more) on estate records 1803-1850, Scioto Company members and descendants, and genealogical gleanings from property records.

Another is from Hartford, Michigan. Under the title "Pearls from the Past" are many photographs, a scattering of obituaries from 1918 to the present, transcriptions of three local histories, and accounts of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, who have survived and persisted in the area.

Picturing southwest Michigan

National Genealogical Society president Jan Alpert writes in the NGS newsletter "UpFront with NGS" about picking up a pictorial history of Van Buren County, Michigan, to walk the streets of a town she's never been in search of the grandmother she never knew. Grandma's name isn't in the index, but she finds her anyway.

Western Michigan man of mystery

The June issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly includes a switcheroo on the old genealogical chestnut of whether there was one or two or more John Does in a particular jurisdiction. Q coeditor Tom Jones takes on Charles D. McLain, David R./Daniel McLain, and D. McLain -- three (apparently) different men in 19th-century western Michigan, who he proves to be the same one! Try to read this without your head spinning, but remember that this is the kind of careful work required to trace the less prominent, less stable, and less fortunate of our ancestors and relatives.

BTW, NGS members can browse this issue and all others back through 2002 on line.

Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society, Michigan

I just caught the note in the Paw Paw Courier-Leader (can't make these names up) that the Van Buren Regional Genealogical Society's annual pot luck meeting and white elephant auction is Monday night the 23rd at the society's mecca, the Webster Memorial Library in Decatur. Besides its namesake county, VBRGS covers the far-southwest Michigan counties of Allegan, Berrien, Cass, and Kalamazoo.

The society has a nice collection of online resources at the Van Buren County GenWeb site, including obituary and cemetery indexes. Its physical resources are in the Webster Library's Local History Room, and they include deed and other fundamental record indexes for several counties. (Check out their online catalog by title.) The Local History Room is itself worthy of note. It also acts as a borrowing agency for Family History Library films. This is a quality of holdings and services I don't see offered at many public libraries of this size. (Decatur's population is under 2,000.) Time to pay them a visit.