She's Everywhere! She's Everywhere!

News item #1: The new Hoosier Genealogist (September, volume 21, issue 3) -- available in good genealogy libraries everywhere, and in the members-only section of the Indiana Genealogical Society along with over 300 databases -- includes "The Jeffries-Robinson/Roberson Family, Allen & Whitley Counties, Indiana," a heavily documented seventeen-page account of four generations of this mixed-race family from the 1780s into the 1900s. (Note that aside from its other merits, the article is titled to maximize the information indexed in PERSI.)

News item #2: The Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne has just announced an online database of information on Indiana deaths prior to 1882 (when the state started public registration of deaths). Much of the underlying information is available at the center. (The database allows fuzzy, exact, or Soundex matching. It does not allow wild cards, browsing, or searching by anything besides first and last names. It does have this interesting property: if you type in any combination of one or more letters in either name box, it will produce up to 1,000 listings of death records for people whose names contain those letters next to each other in that sequence anywhere within it. Think about it.)

Genealogy Center librarian Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, is the author of #1 and compiler of #2. What will she think of next?

History and Change in Whitley County, Indiana

The other night I was reading a 2003 article in the National Genealogical Society Quarterly (available online to members) by Elizabeth Shown Mills. Recapping the history of genealogy in the US, she explains how, after the Civil War, "Genealogy became a tool of ideologies and prejudices rooted in concepts of blood, heredity, race, and stock," often claiming or implying that northern Europeans were genetically better than others.

After that immersion in an unpleasant past, it was a a breath of fresh air to find Becky Wiseman at kinnexions pointing to a recent Talk of the Town profile of Dani Tippmann, the incoming director of the Whitley County History Museum. Tippmann is a member of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma; a distant uncle is Little Turtle, who fought on the losing side against Gen. Anthony Wayne in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Besides having older-than-the-oldest-old-settler credentials, Tippmann's been extensively involved in local and regional history activities.

And if you click over to the Whitley County Historical Society's site and scroll down, your jaw may drop (as mine did) to see the number of genealogical records and indices available on line for this county just west of Fort Wayne.

Sigh. How could my ancestors and relatives have skipped over it altogether?

Online records update at Genealogy Roots

There's no substitute for Denver-based Joe Beine's Genealogy Roots Blog, which makes up in quality for what it lacks in frequency. His 14 Jan post, for instance, includes word of three online marriage indices for Indiana (statewide, Marion County, and Whitley County), and one for Michigan (Kent County).