New in the Archives and What You Can Do

The Indiana Historical Society processed 278 new collections in October and November, and mentioned 31 of them in the March/April issue of InPerspective. Here are half a dozen that caught my eye. For more information check out the online catalog.

• Civil War letters from James C. Stuart of Dearborn County, Erastus L. Pollett, and Samuel Sawyer.
• Scrapbooks, photos, and patient interviews from Billings General Hospital, Fort Benjamin Harrison (1941-1946), an orthopedic center for wounded soldiers.
• A 1916 "tour book" for Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
• 1968-1972 "hemodialysis scrapbooks" from Wallace S. Sims/Methodist Hospital.

Few of us have the time, proximity, or skill set to be involved with IHS acquisitions, but we can all help index the growing on-line collections at FamilySearch.org. Here are their indexing updates for the Midwest, with percentage arbitrated as of 9 March 2013:

Illinois, Chicago—Catholic Church Records, 1833–1910 [Part A], 20.00%

Indiana, Jefferson County Marriages, 1811-1959 [Part B], 28.87%
Indiana, Vermillion County Marriages, 1811–1959, 43.26%
Indiana, Vigo County Marriages,1811–1959, 3.73%
Indiana, Warrick County Marriages, 1811–1959, 46.26%
Indiana, Whitley County Marriages, 1811–1959, 21.72%

Ohio—County Births, 1856–1956 [Part C], 64.98%

Volunteer here.




Harold Henderson, "New in the Archives and What You Can Do," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18  March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Lost Causes in NGSM

Were your ancestors supporters of Prohibition? Did they regard World War II as a bad idea? Lost causes can be genealogical opportunities (they created records too). And seeing the world as these folks saw it can remind us that history did not have to turn out the way it did. Check out my article in the new NGS Magazine.




Harold Henderson, "Lost Causes as Genealogical Opportunities," NGS Magazine 38, no. 4 (October-December 2012):23-26.


Harold Henderson, "Lost Causes in NGSM," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Ration Books and Encyclopedia Annuals

Hat tip to the UpFront with NGS blog highlighting Illya D'Addezio's WW2 ration book collection at Genealogy Today. GT has a number of other offbeat but potentially very helpful sources to seek out.

And it reminded me of another source that you may need to be "a certain age" to remember: the encyclopedia "annual" or "Year Book" chronicling the events of the year just past. I picked up the 1944 Collier's Year Book, covering the events of 1943, at a used-book store years ago. It has a similar fascination to old gazetteers in that it tells the story as it looked when it was happening -- complete with political and sectional infighting -- not in the sentimental pastels of nostalgia. Here's Smith College historian Harold U. Faulkner on rationing during 1943:

On Jan. 2 the OPA [Office of Price Administration] banned all pleasure driving. . . . When pleasure driving was banned, the OPA continued to allow Eastern A-card holders three gallons a week for essential driving. Many car owners, nevertheless, criticized the ban on pleasure driving, insisting that if they were given oil, they should have the right to use it as they pleased. On March 22 the Government lifted the ban, but cut the Eastern A cards from three to one and a half gallons a week. This angered the East for the Middle West was getting four gallons. Black market buying increased and on May 20 the restriction on pleasure driving was renewed.

It wasn't always "all for one and one for all" even during the "good war."

This yearbook had articles from "accidents and accident prevention" to "zoology," plus photos, maps of war areas, and statistical tables, all from the point of view of sixty-eight years ago.

From front to back the annual was dominated by the world war. But even in time of total war there was still room for articles on college and professional football, which in 1943 were dominated by Notre Dame and the Chicago Bears respectively. Not all franchises were able to maintain a team: reportedly, "The Pittsburgh and Philadelphia clubs merged as the Steagles." I won't tell their present-day fans if you won't!



Harold Underwood Faulkner, "United States -- Rationing," p. 552, and Allison Danzig, "Football," pp. 187-88, in William W. Beardsley, ed., 1944 Collier's Year Book, Covering Events of the Year 1943 (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1944).


Harold Henderson, "Ration Books and Encyclopedia Annuals," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Not All History Is Created Equal

World War II brought 20,000 jobs to rural La Porte County, where the county seat had a total population of only 16,000. Workers commuted up to 90 miles round trip per day to assemble explosive shells. The Kingsbury ordnance plant did hire black workers, largely from Gary, but it segregated them in lowly jobs (and separate bomb shelters!) and discriminated against them in workplace discipline. Nor were they allowed to live in the "new town" of Kingsford Heights near the plant.

Historian Katherine Turk has documented the situation in the new issue of the Indiana Magazine of History, drawing among other sources on files of employee letters to President and Mrs. Roosevelt and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, held at the National Archives in Chicago. It's not a pretty picture, and not one you'll hear much about in La Porte County today.

Turk's research interest is in documenting that the African American women's logic involved both equality and fairness, whereas later anti-discrimination laws tended to leave out the fairness part. My interest is in the power of local forgetting: how little is remembered of the virulent white racism that led the government bureaucrats and the contracting company alike to discriminate against black workers and lie to them about it. (Most responses to complaints were pro forma; one woman was turned away because the company doctor said she had high blood pressure, which her own doctor documented was not the case.) The plant would recruit as far away as North Dakota and Georgia rather than allow a black person to work in a job designated for whites.

Placing our ancestors in historical context involves being aware of uncomfortable issues and situations that now go unmentioned. Sometimes it takes an outside historian to pay attention to a part of the picture that local historians turn away from.



Katherine Turk, "'A Fair Chance To Do My Part of Work': Black Women, War Work, and Rights Claims at the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant," Indiana Magazine of Hisotry, vol. 108, no. 3 (September 2012): 209-44.

Harold Henderson, "Not All History Is Created Equal," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mid-20th-century war resource

The St. Joseph County (Indiana) Public Library has an on-line "Service Notes" database indexing almost 40,000 newspaper mentions of local people "who were being drafted, entering the service, being promoted or sent to different locations" between 1941 and 1979. It's in two parts, one for WWII, the other for Korea and Vietnam. Each can be browsed if you specify how to sort the list and a particular branch of service. The results will give name and address, but any underlying newspaper items must be retrieved from either microfilm or clipping files in the library in South Bend.

Obviously this sort of database is just a start on research, and equally obviously it won't help if your person of interest came from somewhere else. But check your relevant library -- they may have a similar card file or index that hasn't made it on line yet!

Midwesterners in NGS Magazine January-March issue

If you're hungry for Midwestern genealogy, the current issue of the National Genealogical Society's NGS Magazine has four treats for you:

(1) Jennifer Holik-Urban's story on her WWI great-great uncle Michael Kokoska, who died in France but was eventually laid to rest in his family's plot in Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago;

(2) Nancy Neils Wehner's story on tracing her WWII Navy grandfather, who enlisted in Omaha, trained near Chicago, and was finally assigned to Tank Ship LST-599 in Evansville (Indiana);

(3) Cari A. Taplin on her northwestern Ohio Sly family's "relationship" to the southern Ohio Slye family of TV cowboy Roy Rogers; and

(4) a bouquet of identity-determination case studies ranging over several states from Minnesota's J. H. Fonkert, CG.

Indiana conference and databases

Members of the Indiana Genealogical Society have a conference Saturday in Indianapolis, featuring military records and Pamela K. Boyer. The stay-at-homes have four new members-only databases on the website to explore, three of them offering leads to military records (these are not images of the records themselves and should not be cited as such):

Revolutionary War Veterans Living in Indiana Who Received Pensions (1835)

Students of Earlham College, Richmond (1859)

Roster of 79th Indiana Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War (1861-1865)

Public Service Company of Indiana Employees Serving in World War II (1944), list from the Danville Republican newspaper

Three cemetery indexes from Noble and Wabash counties are newly available to all visitors.

Indiana Genealogist for March 2009

An absorbing and diverse mix of articles in this quarter's Indiana Genealogist, as well as a timely reminder to would-be contributors that there could be something in it for them to contribute an article to the quarterly. The 2008 Elaine Spires Smith Family History Writing Award ($500) will be given to the best article over 1000 words received for the magazine in 2008 that wasn't a transcription or abstract. Fourteen are in the running; the IGS publication committee will judge.

Why don't more state and regional publications try something like this? It's a low-cost incentive to get us out of our databases and onto our word processors!

March's contents include:

Ron Darrah, "Indiana World War II Genealogy Can Be Tricky," a quick and informative trip around the difficulties of tracking the Greatest Generation. The Indiana legislature made it considerably harder in 2007 by closing off most access to AGO Form 53 certificates from the WW2 Bonus Act.

Robert de Berardinis, "Four French Naval Infantrymen at Fort Vincennes Who Wanted to Become Settlers."* The author has so much to say about the intricacies of eighteenth-century French records on both sides of the Atlantic that it's possible to lose sight of the infantrymen. I know there's some real meat here, because I understood it a lot better the second time I read it.

Rhonda Dunn, "Finding Proof of Family Lore, or, The Search for Redeeming Qualities in My Mean Ole Great-Grandpa, George Dunn." Still some mysteries here, but good evidence that family history can tell less than ideal stories about our ancestors without flinching.

Timothy Paul Reese, "Isaac D. Robbins of Dearborn County, Indiana." Robbins, the author's great-great-grandfather, had an eventful Civil War in the 26th Indiana Volunteer Infantry.

Plus listings of "When They Came to Gary," Indiana Civil War soldiers buried in Crawford County, Pennsylvania, and more...

*footnoted