For the historical context file

Maya Jasanoff in the New York Review of Books, reviewing Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom:

. . . it takes some effort to recall the flexibility of borders in generations past. At the time of the Louisiana Purchase [1803], what we think of as the deep South was really the Far West. At time of the Monroe doctrine [1825], Texas was part of Mexico, and Oregon jointly administered by Britain. At the time of the Gold Rush [1849], the fastest way to get to California involved going south to Central America, crossing the isthmus, and sailing up the Pacific coast. What all this meant was that, if you looked at the world from New Orleans or Natchez, you didn't necessarily see the future of your country in the West.

Nathaniel Philbrick on teenagers 200 years ago:

Today it is difficult to appreciate the level of patriotism commonly felt by those of Wilkes's generation [born 1798], many of whose fathers were fighting in the War of 1812 and whose grandfathers had fought in the Revolution.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 7.

Maya Jasonoff, "Our Steamboat Imperialism," New York Review of Books vol. 60 no. 15 (10 October 2013), 47.

Harold Henderson, "For the historical context file," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Chicago 2401 months ago, and other books

Two hundred years and one month ago, at the start of the War of 1812, the Potawatomi obliterated Chicago. Last month the University of Chicago Press announced a new book on the subject by historian Ann Durkin Keating: Rising Up from Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago. With blurbs from Donald Miller (City of the Century) and Lee Sandlin (Wicked River) it looks to be a good read. (Sandlin's take is not wholly favorable, however.)


Other recently reviewed books of potential microhistorical interest:

Adrea Lawrence, Lessons from an Indian Day School: Negotiating Colonization in Northern New Mexico, 1902-1907, reviewed here.

Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home after World War Two, reviewed here.



Harold Henderson, "Chicago 2401 months ago, and other books," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Newspapers tie Midwesterners back to New England, and a double dose of Henry

Newspapers tie Midwesterners back to New England in two articles in the spring edition of the New England Historic Genealogical Society's popular magazine, American Ancestors.

Patricia Dingwall Thompson unearths a hostage-taking episode near Detroit in the War of 1812. "Living in Montana, I connected with a man in Missouri who owns a handwritten family account of events that occurred in Michigan. I then found historical corroboration from a man in Florida, the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, and a database supplied by NEHGS in Boston."

Patricia Bravender describes how she used family reunion notices in newspapers to untangle some of her Hines ancestors, many of whom ended up in Lorain County, Ohio.

Readers also get a double dose of New England Historical and Genealogical Register editor Henry B. Hoff:

* a nice appreciation of the New York State censuses of 1855 and 1865, and

* a methodological smorgasbord (mostly from the Register's table) of "When Do You Think It's Proved?" (In my perfect world that show would replace WDYTYA.)

Hoff sees some gray areas in the landscape of proof: "Since every genealogist is different and every genealogical situation is different, there are still many instances when genealogists disagree on whether to categorize an identification or a connection as definite -- or with a modifying word such as probably, likely, perhaps, or possibly."


All in American Ancestors, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 2012):
Patricia Dingwall Thompson, "From Family Myth to Historical Account: The McMillan Incident in 1814 Detroit," pp. 25-27.
Patricia Bravender, "Establishing Kinship with Family Reunion Announcements," pp. 38-41.
Henry B. Hoff, "Weighing the Evidence," pp. 33-34, 41. 
Henry B. Hoff, "Appreciating the New York State Census," pp. 54-55.



Harold Henderson, "Newspapers tie Midwesterners back to New England, and a double dose of Henry," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Resources from Michigan, Kokomo, Common-Place, and Randy Seaver

In a 28 February post, "X Marks the Spot", on his blog, Kris Rzepczynski shows a fascinating new dimension of Seeking Michigan's 1897-1920 death records. Your research target may have death certificates in two different jurisdictions!

The on-line journal of early American history, Common-Place, has a good critical review of Alan Taylor's recent history of the War of 1812 -- an awesome book if you have any interest in the war at all.

In NEHGS's "Weekly Genealogist," the indefatigable Valerie Beaudrault points us to the Kokomo library's on-line index to the 7439 burial records of the Rich Funeral Home there 1893-1956. (That's Howard County, Indiana.)

Those wrestling with how to work with conflicting pieces of evidence in commercial genealogy database programs will want to check out Randy Seaver's typically and laudably transparent presentation of his own work over at Genea-Musings.

Sixty Million Acres!

Thanks to the helpful folks on the Transitional Genealogists list, I have now purchased and read James W. Oberly's detailed study, Sixty Million Acres: American Veterans and the Public Lands before the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990). It's definitely worth your time if you deal regularly with bounty-land recipients under the four different Congressional acts passed in 1847, 1850, 1852, and 1855, which together involved most veterans of most wars from the War of 1812 through the Mexican War. It's also good microscopic historical background, connecting these laws with the changing politics of that era, and also reviewing and modifying past interpretations by earlier generations of historians.

Oberly starts with the politics: how Congress decided how to distribute the public land (it all started with the need to boost recruitment pronto during the Mexican War), how the administrative offices implemented distribution, and how the recipients (veterans and widows) used their warrants.

At the time, there was much concern about speculators monopolizing land or bilking veterans. Oberly finds little evidence that they did, but they did make some windfall profits.

The expectation that these warrants would spark additional settlement by the veterans themselves was also not fulfilled. (A very rough comparison: if the government offered Alaskan bush land to Vietnam-era veterans now, how many would choose to go?) In Oberly's random sample of warrants, fewer than 5 percent of the recipients used them to "locate" land for themselves. {92} Most warrants were sold, often through middlemen, and there were intertwined national and local markets for them. The market seems to have been competitive, and somewhat volatile. In general Oberly thinks the sellers did OK. (Genealogical lesson #1: if you find such a warrant in use, the odds are very good that the person who took up the land was not the original recipient and quite possibly not a veteran of any of those wars.)

The line of settlement pretty much determined where the warrants ended up being located: Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin together make up roughly half the acreage, with Missouri and Minnesota close behind. {85} Southern states were underrepresented in part because the big boom state in those years was Texas, which had its own public-lands system inherited from its brief independence.

War of 1812 Records

As if you needed another reason to join the National Genealogical Society? The current (April-June) issue of its NGS Magazine includes a detailed how-to article by Marie Varrelman Melchiori, CG, CGL, on how to find relevant War of 1812 veterans' records in the National Archives. I do mean nitty-gritty: "When using the microfilmed indexes for the 1812 pensions, there are pages that appear to be blank . . . [meaning that] the film needs to be turned," because applicants under the "Old War" pension act have jackets with a stamped form at the very bottom of the envelope. Don't even think about working these people without this article in hand.

Some of these veterans received bounty land warrants for portions of land in what is now more than a dozen counties in western Illinois -- between the Illinois River and the Mississippi, AKA the "Military Tract."

Ohio Records and Pioneer Families #4, 2008

The last 2008 issue of Ohio Records and Pioneer Families has material from a good half of the state's counties, with special focus on the counties of Wood, Mercer, Montgomery, and Hamilton.

"The Service and Pensions of William McCleary in the War of 1812," by Daniel H. Reigle

"John Wilson Langdon -- Letters Home, Cincinnati to Wilbraham, Massachusetts" tr. Kay Ballantyne Hudson *

"First Families of Ohio: The Early Years," abstr. Kay Ballantyne Hudson

"Revolutionary War Pension Application Abstracts," abstr. Lois Wheeler

"Official Register of Physicians by County, 1896 Wood County"

"Merchants, Manufacturers & Traders of Ohio, 1885"

"Ohio's Lost Militia Companies of the War of 1812," by Eric Johnson* (Twelve that aren't included in some usual references.)

"Ohio Governors Who Served in the War of 1812," by Eric Johnson (There were eight!)

"William Dickman, His Story," by Cecelia A. Anderson-Carvalho

*Footnoted

"Perhaps the most unlikely scenario"

The Midwest might have been very different. Francois Furstenburg considers what we might humorously call the "prehistory" of the Midwest in the June American Historical Review 113:647-677:

"Taking an Atlantic perspective on the continental interior, it appears that the Seven Years' War, which ostensibly ended in North America in 1760 and in Europe in 1763, in fact continued with only brief interruptions to 1815 -- in the form of the American Revolution of the 1770s, the Indian wars of the 1780s and 1790s, and the War of 1812. Call it a Long War for the West. During this Long War, as the action shifted among various 'hot spots' across the trans-Appalachian West, the great issue animating Native, imperial, and settler actors alike involved the fate of the region: would it become a permanent Native American country? Would it fall to some distant European power? Or, perhaps the most unlikely scenario of all, would it join with the United States? Only in the wake of the British defeat in the War of 1812 was the region's fate as part of the expanding United States settled once and for all."

If you were raised on the kind of predestinarian history of the US as I was, you may be surprised that anyone would think it unlikely for the Midwest to become American. But it was no gimme. Anthony Wayne got the second largest city in Indiana named after him because he succeeded against the natives where two previous generals had failed, and failed miserably. More strategically, as Fursternberg points out, the original colonies faced east, across the Atlantic. The Appalachians were a considerable barrier, and once across them settlers were naturally oriented toward the south and the Caribbean by the way the rivers flowed. "In seeking to control both sides of the Appalachians, U.S. policymakers were attempting something that no political entity, Native or European, had ever accomplished without rapidly disintegrating."

War of 1812

With characteristic generosity, the Missouri State Genealogical Association blog posts links and online resources for the War of 1812, few of which have anything to do with their state. Links include Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio sources, a Newberry Library online listing of mostly print sources for those states plus Michigan and Missouri, plus others outside our immediate coverage area.

Get your deceased relatives shaped up for the fast-approaching 200th anniversary of this conflict that shaped the proto-Midwest and put an end to Indian tribes' ability to survive by playing one government or empire off against another.