Mozley-Van Natta article in Minnesota Genealogist

My great-great-grandfather-in-law probably didn't make many Baptist converts during his time in Green Lake County, Wisconsin (1846-1877), but he kept at it until his death there at age 55.

He and Elizabeth Van Natta had seven children. Two daughters and two sons have descendants. Their eighteen grandchildren divided into three roughly equal groups: farmers and blue-collar workers; white-collar workers from clerk to chemist; and -- lest we forget -- those who died young. Thanks to generations of careful family members we have several of his and Elizabeth's letters.

They gave their youngest son the middle name "Fremont" in 1862, which likely refers to John Charles Fremont, the famous explorer of the Far West, first major-party Presidential candidate to oppose slavery (1856), and an impetuous if not insubordinate officer in the Mexican War and the Civil War. A daughter was named after a then-famous Baptist missionary who died young overseas, Harriet Newell.

Thanks to Minnesota Genealogist co-editors J. H. Fonkert, CG, and Elizabeth Gomoll for accepting, editing, and publishing this article. Eventually portions of it will fit into a book on the family starting with Rev. Thomas's grandparents in England and including a first-hand account of their emigration from England in 1833.




“Midwest Migrations of Rev. Thomas and Elizabeth (Van Natta) Mozley and Allied Families of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” Minnesota Genealogist 48 (Winter 2017): 14-26.

Ephemeral migrants and Wisconsin vital record duplicates

Three lessons from long day trip for research in central Wisconsin:

(1) DEEDS ARE GOOD. I often see family members who move west, stay briefly, and then go back home or strike out in a whole different direction. These folks are hard to track. They constitute another reason to look at all the deeds created by other family members who we already know stayed longer. I have an original four-page 1847 letter from Thomas Mozley to his younger brother Edward, extolling Wisconsin's climate (he'd been there a whole year) and a particularly promising site for Edward's smithy. Since Edward does not seem to appear there in 1850 or 1855, I assumed he never showed up at all. But he was there long enough to witness at least one deed created by another family member.

(2) VITAL RECORDS CAN BE WEIRD, but pre-1907 Wisconsin vital records are still wonderful. In this same family there appear to be at least three separate records of a single 1873 marriage: one apparently contemporary with the wedding (of course that's the one I didn't get to see before time ran out), one submitted in the 1890s, and one submitted in the early 1900s. I viewed the last two. They are largely in agreement, but the later one contains a bit more information than the other. Huh. How reliable is that? (Informants are not named; the evidence suggests that nobody paid attention to the earlier entries. All weddings should get such coverage!)

(3) I LOVE CHICAGO, BUT NOT DRIVING AROUND IT. There is no rational way for me to get to Wisconsin without navigating either Chicago or some suburbs. Getting up at 5 a.m. is not early enough. One alternative would work only if the marvelous State Historical Society at Madison is the goal -- take the Indiana airport shuttle to O'Hare, and then take the Wisconsin airport shuttle to the University of Wisconsin campus. Has anybody actually done this?

(4) I ALREADY HAVE A FOLLOWUP LIST FOR WHEN I GET TO GO BACK. First item: Learn how to count. Second item: Avoid weather. I saw large trees that had been pulled out of the ground, roots and all, by storms the day before.

Never ignore childless siblings, part 2

My wife's grandfather had two older sisters, Bonnie and Nellie, who never married and had no descendants. Both had professional careers in the first half of the 20th century, but we never learned much about them, partly because they had decamped to California by the mid-1920s. I've been working on their mother's family for publication(s) and found that I pretty much had to reconstruct their professional lives by wide searching and judicious use of on-line newspapers and directories. It made me feel that perhaps they had not been taken seriously enough by other family members.

In the course of this searching I came upon a contribution Bonnie made in 1927 to a folk music collection, and that ended up on a folk-music site, Bluegrass Messengers. It was the lyrics to a folk song that their grandfather William was said to have brought with him from England to Wisconsin in the late 1840s, and that his son Sam, their father, now a Wisconsin blacksmith, sang for them. (If you know any ballad tunes at all, you will see how the rhythm fits; I haven't got hold of an audio version yet.)

My hair, what there is of it, stood right up on end. Of all the things I might have expected, a chance to eavesdrop on Sam and Harriet and their three children by the fireside, most likely in the 1880s when the children were growing up, was the last thing on my mind. What a gift, one their grand-nephew-in-law only opened by accident 90 years later.

It's a cliche because it's true. You really never know what you will find. By the same token, we never know how some small act of preservation now may reverberate in future generations.

Underhill, Chittenden County, Vermont, on FamilySearch -- and other odd partial indexes

In order to use the relevant part of the FamilySearch collection of Vermont town records -- specifically those from Underhill, Chittenden County -- I have ascertained where the various volumes begin. This collection is browse-only, not indexed. But finding where individual volumes begin and end can make the browsing process far more efficient.

Volume 1, page 1 = image 13 of 649. It is preceded by some handwritten notes, and followed by a table of contents covering the first 64 pages of volume 1. This includes minutes of the first town meeting in 1795.

Either volume 2 is continuously paginated with volume 1, or it is missing.

Volume 3, cover = image 193 of 649. Reportedly 1805-1810.

Volume 4, cover page = image 286 of 649. Reportedly 1808-1814.

Volume 5, page 1 = image 476 of 649. Reportedly 1815-1820. Last entry is February 1820.

Several other off-the-beaten-path indexes are on Midwest Roots: a FamilySearch file of Allegany County, New York, probates; the 1857 assessor's list for Porter County, Indiana; and microfilmed small-town directories from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

Since there are no in-book indexes, this is all browsing all the time. I have so many relatives here that I'm just working backwards from the end of volume 5 and have already found some goodies. It appears that most items are deeds. (Volume 1 may be more variable.) There is at least one tax list.

Someday no doubt there will be an every-name index to this collection, but I don't think it would be wise to wait!

136 years ago: the Upper Midwest from the back of a horse

During the 1800s, even ancestors who would end up staying home often tried going West to see how it suited them. My great-grandfather spent a few years in Kansas hoping to alleviate his wife's asthma, but they returned to southern Illinois.

And in the spring of 1879, my wife's great-grandfather left his young family behind for several weeks and took a 430-mile horseback ride west across part of Wisconsin and most of Minnesota. He sent back postcards and letters, which I transcribed and annotated, and which have now been published in the Minnesota Genealogical Quarterly. It's all there -- the rain, the cold, the boredom, the jokes, the universal presumption that if your traveling companion fell sick you could find him a bed in a farmhouse along the way, and forge on.


"Across Wisconsin and Minnesota on Horseback, 1879," Minnesota Genealogical Quarterly vol. 45, no. 4 (2014): 7-9.

Isaac Humphrey and his descendants in The Genealogist

More than ten years ago I heard a cliche come to life. On my first genealogical road trip (to Licking County, Ohio) I overheard a library visitor ask a genealogy society volunteer where the book of her family was kept.

A week ago the cliche came to life again, but in a much better way. The new Fall 2014 issue of The Genealogist arrived in our mailbox, and it included the first installment of a full account of the ancestors and relatives of my mother-in-law's great-grandmother Sarah Mehitabel Humphrey Coleman Bliss, researched and chronicled by William T. Ruddock of Michigan.

TG is published twice a year by the honorary scholarly American Society of Genealogists. Among other things it specializes in family accounts that are too long for any other magazine to consider. The descendants of Isaac Humphrey (1748-1829) are numerous and obscure and include multiple generations of men named Isaac. They gave my daughter and me multiple migraines when we struggled with the family back when we had fewer internet resources and less expertise.

Isaac's daughter Sarah married John Russell (4 children) and stayed around Stephentown, Rensselaer County, New York (a crossroads village for several lines of ancestors). Daughter Asenath married William Dixon (6 children) and went west to Lorain County, Ohio. Son Lemuel married Sarah Allen (6 children) and went north to Warren County, New York. Some of Lemuel and Sarah's children went to Wisconsin.

The article covers female lines to the grandchildren and male lines to the great-grandchildren. If the numbers of descendants in this first installment are typical, it may be a year before I get to see the whole "book" of this family, but it will be worth the wait.




William T. Ruddock, "Isaac6 Humphrey of Stephentown, New York, and His Descendants" [part 1], The Genealogist 28 (Fall 2014): 202-222.

Harold Henderson, "Isaac Humphrey and his descendants in The Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 October 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Books: everyday life in three centuries

One of the pleasures of a national institute or conference is the chance to browse and buy good books. I bought the following four from Maia's Books at GRIP last week. I ended up choosing mostly books that told stories -- but that did so in a knowledgeable historical context, not just for quaintness' sake. We'll see. Hopefully this will not be the last you hear of them!

Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as Their Land: The Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Most of my mother-in-law's ancestors and a fraction of my mother's and father-in-law's ancestors were around for this.

Harvey Green, The Uncertainty of Everyday Life, 1915-1945 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000). Parents, grandparents, and most great-grandparents were active in these years. Growing up in the 1950s was not entirely different, in that much of the built environment was still there from the 1920s, but I could easily assume similarities that were not there.

Joan M. Jensen, Calling This Place Home: Women on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1850-1925 (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006). In-laws were in Wisconsin early, whether from England, New England, New York, or Pennsylvania.

David T. Hawkings, Pauper Ancestors: A Guide to the Records Created by the Poor Laws in England and Wales (Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2011). In 1819, my two-year-old great-great-grandfather's impoverished family was removed from the parish of Long Bennington in Lincolnshire to the parish of Teigh in Rutlandshire.




Harold Henderson, "Books: everyday life in three centuries," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 July  2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

More Midwestern deaths on line

Joe Beine's Online Searchable Death Indexes and Records has new material for twelve lucky Midwestern counties:

Illinois: Cook, DuPage, Jackson
Indiana: Warrick
Michigan: Alpena, Emmet, Mason, Oakland
Ohio: Montgomery, Tuscarawas
Wisconsin: Oneida, Rock

Some of these are tied in with other local indexes -- take a little time to check out the others as well!


Harold Henderson, "More Midwestern deaths on line," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 July 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Now up to eleven mostly Midwestern indexes and finding aids

In addition to the nine links posted last year, two additional research aids are available on my web site:

Wisconsin Small City Directories 1903-1936 -- four rolls of microfilm published by City Directories of the United States, containing 29 directories for various years for more than 24 different towns and 7 different counties -- but labeled neither on the boxes nor at the beginning of the films themselves!

In order to make this resource useable I have spooled through the four films and listed title and publisher (when available) and date, and posted the lists and indexed them. This Wisconsin listing joins similar listings for Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. I have included CDUS's numbers as well as the numbers assigned to them at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, where I consulted them.

Few of these towns were able to support annual or even biennial directories, but it's a good bet that diligent researchers who visit local libraries and archives will find directories for more years than were microfilmed here. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries each of these towns had their own confident local business community.

Indiana private laws relating to La Porte County 1843-1847 and 1850, abstracted from Google Books. This is an experiment in making this relatively obscure resource more available. These are drawn from "session law" books describing the laws passed relating to particular people and organizations in each legislative session. Are your people mentioned?



Harold Henderson, "Now up to eleven mostly Midwestern indexes and finding aids," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 April 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

More Midwestern death records news via Joe Beine

Joe Beine's Genealogy Roots Blog yesterday announced new death records on line. In the Midwest there's more for more than 8 counties in four states:

Illinois: Kane and Lake counties.

Michigan: Kent and Ottawa counties.

Ohio: Several counties added to the already excellent Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center obituary collection.

Wisconsin: Chippewa, Green, Richland, and Sheboygan counties.


Harold Henderson, "More Midwestern death records news via Joe Beine," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted    2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

On-line newspapers by state

Digitized newspapers are everywhere, but so many different outfits -- both free and commercial -- are getting in on the act that it can be hard to keep with which ones are available where your ancestors lived. Kenneth R. Marks over at The Ancestor Hunt has a series of listings by state, including Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, as well as New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maine. I haven't used them all . . . yet.


Harold Henderson, "On-line newspapers by state," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Wisconsin Probates On Line at FamilySearch

As of 13 February 2014, nine Wisconsin counties had probate materials on line at FamilySearch.org. These are all browseable but not searchable. When I say they're indexed, I mean that a handwritten or typed index has been scanned for part or all of them. Please note that FamilySearch's own list of what's on line is inaccurate on several points, including the claim to have Burnett County.

This is a supplement to the syllabus for my 18 February 2014 webinar, "Probate Will Not Be the Death of You," for the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society. Even if you're scared of courthouses or allergic to them, you can learn plenty about probate from browsing these images.

Bayfield County 1874-1919 loose papers, no index

Fond du Lac County 1866-1932 loose papers (incomplete, starts late), index for 1918-1948

Green County 1848-1923 loose papers, no index

Jackson County 1878-1931 loose papers (incomplete, starts late), no index

La Crosse County 1874-1910 loose papers (incomplete, starts late), no index

Outagamie County 1872-1912 will and administration books, indexes 1894-1980

Pepin County, 1900-1935 loose papers (incomplete, starts late), index? 1869-1950

Shawano County, 1861-1933 loose papers, no index

Trempealeau County, 1889-1920 loose papers (incomplete, starts late), no index

Outagamie County is in its own collection, "Wisconsin, Outagamie County Records, 1825-1980 -- Probate." The other eight counties are in the collection "Wisconsin, Probate Estate Files, 1848-1948."




Harold Henderson, "Wisconsin Probates On Line at FamilySearch," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 February 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Additional Midwestern death records on line!

Joe Beine has added or updated online records for 14 Midwestern (and many other!) counties at his Genealogy Roots Blog:

Illinois:  DuPage and Lee

Indiana: Allen, Clark, Howard, Jefferson, Miami, and Tipton

Michigan: Calhoun, Chippewa, Kalamazoo, and Oakland

Ohio: Mahoning

Wisconsin: Waupaca and statewide



Harold Henderson, "Additional Midwestern death records on line!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 January 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0

There's an old saying, "When you're tired of London, you're tired of life." Well, when you get tired of browsing this book, you're tired of genealogy.

Earlier this month my friend and colleague Michael Hait released the third edition of his On Line State Resources for Genealogy. It's up to 1140 pages and more than 9000 resources -- hosted at a bewildering variety of web sites, with a much deeper and different reach than the popular free and subscription mega-sites.

Contrary to the title, the book includes on-line resources at the national level including the National Archives. Some sites require sign-in. "Resources" include images of original records; derivative records (such as transcriptions and abstracts); authored works; and finding aids and indexes. As stated in the introductory material, use the finding aids and indexes and derivative sources to lead to the original records when possible.

The table of contents is arranged by state and then by repository in apparently random order within each state. A click on any entry in the table of contents takes you directly to the repository's listings, and a click on the specific repository's link takes you there.

Midwestern researchers will be interested to know that Indiana listings occupy 92 pages, Illinois 61, Ohio 46, and Michigan and Wisconsin each 14.

This undertaking is nothing less than gargantuan. And it includes resources I did not know about but should have. Still it doesn't have everything: absent are La Crosse, Wisconsin, city directories; the Monroe County, Wisconsin, Local History Room; and several name indexes available at the Chicago branch of NARA.

But as the numbers mount up this enterprise faces a deeper problem -- how to organize the resources. Not only are they proliferating daily (the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center just announced eleven new ones). Often the originating agency may be different, or in a different place, than the record itself (such as county records created and listed under the name of a state agency). Equally bothersome, it is also often difficult to discern where one repository ends and another begins, since the same collection may be reached through more than one portal. It certainly helps that this book is searchable and not in print form, but part of its value is that the resources also be rationally browseable.

This compilation is itself an essential part of a "reasonably exhaustive search" as prescribed by BCG's Genealogy Standards, but other searches need to be made both within and outside of it.

Another form of browsing is to follow the compiler's new blog featuring a resource every few days.






Michael Hait, comp., On Line State Resources for Genealogy, third edition (PDF/ebook, privately printed, 2013).


Harold Henderson, "On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]







Harold Henderson, "On Line State Records for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Good news for Wisconsin researchers!

The Wisconsin State Historical Society kindly takes us behind the curtain and lets us know that it's about halfway through digitizing its 8,000 Sanborn insurance maps, proceeding alphabetically. So this is especially good news if your town of interest is big enough and falls in the alphabet between Ableman (Sauk County, 1912) and Marshfield (Wood County, 1904). The rest of the alphabet should be done by next spring, and will be followed by digitizing the 800 insurance maps for Milwaukee, which present special problems. You can go direct to their free on-line map images too.

And if there's anyone reading this who never heard of Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, you are in for the treat of your genealogy life. Intended to record information relevant to the insurability of specific buildings and towns, for us they offer detailed enough information to build a replica of our ancestors'  late-19th- or early-20th-century home towns. (I used them a bunch when writing about my relatives in Wharton, Texas, a place where I have never set foot.)


Harold Henderson, "Good news for Wisconsin researchers!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 November  2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Fine points in Wisconsin archives' searchable finding aids

Many local Wisconsin records have migrated into the state's fourteen Area Research Centers -- another reason to call ahead when visiting a courthouse for the first time, as they may have exported the records you need to see!

The ARCs are real archives, with finding aids for the collections. Although they are scattered around the state, there is a central point where you can browse or search all the finding aids: Archival Resources in Wisconsin: Digital Finding Aids. You can search either by title or by every word in the finding aids.

As usual in such cases, it helps to figure out the right search terms. General browsing will find a great many collections of personal papers of all sorts. But it also works to search on genealogy terms. I finally learned that a search for "Wisconsin County Court" in titles only will bring up 86 court records that can be sorted alphabetically in order to scan for target counties. These include probate, guardianship, civil, criminal, insanity, divorce, and other listings.

Internally, most of those finding aids list the cases by number or by years. The case lists sometimes include classic archivist's notes like this one from reel 9 (cases 400-481) of Trempealeau County Probates 1855-1900: "Files 427-428 are filed between 453-456; these may really be files 454-455. They are not the same files 427-428 that are filed between 426-429. No files 424-425, 429, 474." (If you enjoy notes like this as much as I do, you have found your calling.)

But a few counties list probate cases by name. It was in this way that I discovered some very interesting people related to my wife, whose records had somehow escaped me in the past. I can see several trips to the Badger State in my future . . .


Harold Henderson, "Fine points in Wisconsin archives' searchable finding aids," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 August 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Good news from the fast-moving world of dead people

Joe Beine has posted latest updates on death records. From the Midwest we have:

ILLINOIS: obituary indexes from Alexander, Cook, Pulaski, Rock Island, Tazewell, and Union counties

INDIANA: obituary indexes from Henry, Lake, and Rush counties

MICHIGAN: indexes from Clinton, Grand Traverse, Kalamazoo, Livingston, and Shiawasee counties

OHIO: indexes from Cuyahoga (cemeteries) and Scioto (general) counties

WISCONSIN: cemetery database for Marinette, Oconto, and Shawano counties

For the full strength, visit his main site.



Harold Henderson, "Good news from the fast-moving world of dead people," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 August 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History -- not quite what we thought

Hamlin Garland is not now a household word, if he ever was, and his late-Victorian writing style hasn't helped. But those seeking a realistic portrait of pioneering in the upper Midwest (Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota) will enjoy reading A Son of the Middle Border. He spent his boyhood, youth, and young manhood pioneering and ended in 1893 telling his father Richard,

Father, you've been chasing a will-o'-the-wisp. For fifty years you've been moving westward, and always you have gone from certainty to uncertainty, from a comfortable home to a shanty. For thirty years you've carried mother on a ceaseless journey -- to what end? Here you are - snowbound on a treeless plain with mother old and crippled.... You must take the back trail.

This message may be unwelcome to many 21st-century genealogists, as it was to the old Civil War veteran. But it's closer to real life than the sentimental sketches in the mug books being published around the same time.

Hamlin Garland was a man of his time. He maintained, and probably believed, the fiction that the Indians just "melted away" before white settlement. His critique of pioneering had nothing to do with the immorality of white people's stealing Indian land; it had to do with the resultant quality of life for the white people themselves.


A completely different approach to a similar subject is a recent working paper by economists on the results of the 1832 Cherokee land lottery, in which land recently "acquired" from Indians was offered at random to white settlers. The economists compared those who received the windfall with those who did not, using 1850 census data, and found that most of the benefits accrued, not to the poorest, but to middling and wealthy.

Almost two decades after the lottery, winners were, on average, $700 richer than a comparable population that did not win the lottery. The gains in wealth, however, are not evenly distributed among the lottery winners. Indeed, the poorest third of lottery winners were essentially as poor as the poorest third of lottery losers.

History is rarely what we expect; no wonder the future is so surprising.




Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (New York: Macmillan, 1917).

Hoyt Bleakley and Joseph Ferrie, "Up from Poverty? The 1832 Cherokee Land Lottery and the Long-run Distribution of Wealth," National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, 21 June 2013 version (http://home.uchicago.edu/~bleakley/Bleakley_Ferrie_Up.pdf : viewed 5 July 2013).


Harold Henderson, "History -- not quite what we thought," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

Good news for Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Missouri researchers!

Five new or expanded Midwestern collections on FamilySearch in the last 2 days:

Illinois -- Lee County

Missouri -- Cole County

Ohio -- Trumbull County and Cleveland

Wisconsin -- 1865 state census

Tour the Pacific of 200 years ago in the April NYGBR

I shouldn't have been surprised -- but I was when I opened the April 2013 New York Genealogical and Biographical Record and found myself plunged into a series of trading voyages around and across the Pacific Ocean in the early 1800s, in the first installment of Edward E. Steele's lead article on Capt. William J. Pigot. Pigot and his family were New Yorkers all right, but he at least did not stay put. Steele combined a great story with great genealogy detective work to make sure the right story was being told about the right people.

(Those who read Steele's article will understand why this is the first genealogy article I ever read that brought to mind John Updike's early story, "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island," in Pigeon Feathers; now also in The New Yorker's subscriber-only online archive for 13 January 1962.)

More conventionally, I was pleased to find a crop of Midwesterners in the first installment of George R. Nye's account of the Preserved Fish Deuel family, with locations including Minnesota (Cottonwood, Faribault, McLeod, Brown, and Ramsey counties), Illinois (Lake County), Wisconsin (Waushara, Marquette, and Green Lake counties), and Iowa (Wright, Kossuth, and Osceola counties).

It's not a slam on the article to say that I enjoyed the footnotes just as much. As the author notes, the article "demonstrates the types of sources and analysis that can be used to document a family" even when vital records are few and far between. Among the alternatives employed were the hybrid township-military records created by many New York town clerks during the Civil War, documenting not only the service but genealogically relevant facts about soldiers from their area.

East-central Ohio (Coshocton, Licking, and Fairfield counties) also was a landing place for one descendant of the Pine-Pettit-Dorlon connection documented in the concluding part of Robert J. Meyers' account.




Edward E. Steele, "William J. Pigot, Captain of the Forester," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 85-100.

George R. Nye, "Children and Grandchildren of Preserved Fish7 Deuel of Cambridge and Massena, New York," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 123-39.

Robert J. Meyers, "A Pine-Pettit-Dorlon Connection: Untangling the Family of Elias D. Pine (1793-1866) of Hempstead, Long Island, New York (concluded)," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 140-54.



Harold Henderson, "Tour the Pacific of 200 years ago in the April NYGBR," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]