Analyzing too much information with William Flint (1815-1878)

Often we have to eke out one precious fact at a time by analyzing and correlating terse and scattered records. But in the case of the agriculture schedules of the U.S. census (1850-1880), we have to find ways to  make sense of a cornucopia of information.

See how I did it for my great-great grandfather William Flint of St. Clair County, Illinois, in the new Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly (membership required). And if this puts you in mind of an Illinois topic you want to write about, managing editor Julie Cahill Tarr would love to hear from you.



Harold Henderson, "William Flint's Farm: Digging Deeper," Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly 46 (Spring 2014): 5-8.


Image: S.D. Fisher, ed., Transactions of the Department of Agriculture, State of Illinois, with Reports from County Agricultural Boards, for the Year 1879 (Springfield: Weber & Co., 1880), 66.


Harold Henderson, "Analyzing too much information with William Flint (1815-1878)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

I almost went to the library by accident: agriculture schedules

Trying to pinpoint a landless research target in the 1850 census between his landowning neighbors, I realized I needed to see if they were also neighbors in the agriculture schedule -- and made a note to check those records next time I visited a library that held them. Then I remembered which century it is, and typed "Ancestry nonpopulation schedules" into Google -- much easier than trying to locate them within Ancestry -- and discovered that their on-line holdings of these underused resources have grown.

Still nothing for Indiana or Wisconsin, but the 1850-1880 agriculture schedules for most counties in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, can be browsed (at the township level, which is pretty quick) or searched. A total of 21 states are listed, including also Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York.



Harold Henderson, "I almost went to the library by accident: agriculture schedules," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Genealogy in Other Parts of the Library

Genealogists who visit the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center from out of town, such as me, may make the mistake of thinking that the genealogy part is the whole library. Even those of us who notice the other departments may miss the fact that they contain useful genealogical material too. Here are three from my experience:

Microfilmed editions of the Methodist publication Western Christian Advocate (published 1834-1929) are held in the reference division of Readers' Service Reference (on the first floor).

Physical copies of early local laws passed by the Indiana General Assembly (1828-1835, 1839, 1844-1852) are in the Indiana Documents part of Business and Technology Reference, at the opposite end of the second floor from genealogy. They are not uniformly catalogued in the library catalog, however.

The monumental compilation of summary figures of the agriculture schedule of the 1860 US census, J. C. G. Kennedy's Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 317.3 F51GA, is also in the business department. It's a good tool for comparing ancestors and others at that time. (It's also available on Google Books if that format is manageable for you.)



Harold Henderson, "Genealogy in Other Parts of the Library," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]