Canoes, Kansas farmers, and the infinity of genealogy

Some folks argue that genealogy is limited because there are only so many records, only so much information to be found about the past; unlike people working in the experimental sciences, we can't create new data by conducting experiments.

I don't buy it, for two reasons:

One, this opinion rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of genealogy. Even if information about the past is finite, there is no limit to the available evidence about the past, because there is no limit to the number of ideas people can have. New evidence is not just found by finding new records or new information. Evidence is also discovered is by seeing the same old information in a new light. (And yes, this subject will come up in Kimberly Powell's and my course in January at the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy.)

Two, there is more information out there than I can imagine, even after taking into account that there is more than I can imagine. Two from today:

(1) Kansas State University librarians are digitizing old agriculture magazines like crazy, benefiting from grants in the thousands, not millions. To be available in 2015 are Kansas Farmer (1863-1954), and after that Kansas 4‐H Journal (1955-1988), Kansas Future Farmer (1929-1979), and five additional newsletters and magazines.  (Hat tip to ResearchBuzz.) I believe it would be professional malpractice if I failed to disclose that one of the librarians involved is surnamed Farmer.

(2) What did your ancestor do at the canoe factory? If he (she?) worked at Old Town Canoe Company in Maine during much of the 20th century, you may be able to see when his hands touched a particular canoe keel. Check out these "canoe build sheets" and the associated discussion forum.



Harold Henderson, "Canoes, Kansas farmers, and the infinity of genealogy," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 August 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

My ancestor had $1000 in 1860 -- was he rich?

As genealogists, we need to make the world of the past as understandable as possible to our present-day audience. One way is to translate dollar values from, say, 1800, into current money. Sounds simple? It's not.

According to Westegg, $100 in 1800 would be worth $1265.30 in 2010.

According to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, $100 in 1800 would be worth $1284.90 in 2010.

According to Measuring Worth, $100 in 1800 would be worth something between $1730 and $3,050,000 in 2010. It depends on exactly what you're valuing, and which of ten different measures you work with.

One problem with these translations is that the passage of time changes things in many dimensions. You could buy bread in both 1800 and 2010, but it was relatively more expensive in 1800. Not even a multibillionaire in 1800 could buy a car, a liver transplant, or a post on Facebook. Few people in 2010 could buy a buggy whip -- or a comfortable place to spend the night in a strange city without presenting an identity card. Not only have the items of the typical "market basket" changed, so have their values relative to one another. So even the best translations are unlikely to agree.

Of the three reputable sites above, Measuring Worth offers the most detailed and thoughtful explanation. Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, both economists at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explain that it works best to use different measures to compare commodities, income/wealth, and projects over time. "There is no single 'correct' measure," they conclude, "and economic historians use one or more different indicators depending on the context of the question." On the site they use ten different measures -- check it out! You can measure by the Consumer Price Index or the proportion of Gross Domestic Product or the average laborer's wage, and get different results that highlight different aspects of the changes over time. (See the gasoline example at the bottom of this page: among other things, we learn that a gallon of gasoline is only one-sixth as great a part of the Gross Domestic Product now as it was in 1949.)

So even this piece of genealogical context isn't a simple lookup! I would suggest a couple of ways to use these tools without stretching them to absurdity, confusing your readers, or having to go back to school and major in economics:

(1) Focus on shorter time intervals. If your research target owned $200 worth of real estate in 1850 and $1,000 in 1860, how much of that was true gain and how much was inflationary? Many of the conundrums of long time comparisons do not apply to short-term comparisons, because the economic world didn't change radically during any single decade.

(2) Use cross-sectional comparisons -- where your ancestor stood relative to others, rather than trying for a precise dollar value. For instance, in the agricultural schedule of the US census for 1860, you can learn the cash value of your research target's farm -- and use Kennedy's 1864 statistical compilation of agricultural information from that census to calculate the average (mean or median, it could make a difference) value of a farm in their county. It may be more pertinent to learn how their farm stacked up against neighbors in that time and place than to get a dollar value in 2010, when farming is no longer such an omnipresent occupation.

In any case, studying the various comparisons gives us another sense of how different the past really was.


Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, "Measures of Worth," Measuring Worth, 2010 (www.measuringworth.com/worthmeasures.php : accessed 24 June 2012).


Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1864); digital image, Internet Archive (http://archive.org/details/agricultureunit01kenngoog : accessed 24 June 2012).



Harold Henderson, "My ancestor had $1000 in 1860 -- was he rich?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Drainage tile, anyone?

You never know when history is going to happen to you. I went outside the other morning and started clearing up a junk corner my wife and I had targeted for extinction. One item I picked up was a hollow burnt-orange cylinder with walls about half an inch thick -- a drainage tile.

It's very easy not to know what a huge role this piece of ceramic hardware played in the process of turning the often-swampy Midwestern prairie into productive farms connected by actual roads. Not only did it require the technology of creating standardized tile (these days I think they use continuous rolls of corrugated flexible black plastic), but the laws and organization necessary to create drainage districts, because the process won't work unless all the neighbors agree on it.

Tile was just as essential, but less charismatic or conspicuous than barbed wire, because once the fields are drained there's nothing to see. But eastern Illinois, western Indiana, and northwestern Ohio (just to name the parts I'm personally familiar with) would look entirely different if our ancestors and relatives hadn't participated in this process.

This process was not without controversy, then or now. A diverse prairie ecosystem was destroyed and replaced by what are now monocultures of corn and soybeans, dependent on annual doses of oil and chemicals to produce high yields. (In some places those once universally despised swamps are being re-created.)

Law professor James E. Herget wrote a thorough legal account in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society back in 1978; Englishman Hugh Prince's 1997 book Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes, at least part of which is available on a German offshoot of GoogleBooks, is more wide-ranging and even-handed.

How much have people used drainage district records in genealogy? Well, it's not unheard of. The Illinois State Archives holds some such records, and some relevant court records have been abstracted on US GenWeb for Stoddard County, Missouri. I'd love to hear more if anyone has gone beyond staring at an old piece of clay tile.



James E. Herget, "Taming the Environment: The Drainage District in Illinois," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society vol. 71, no. 2 (May 1978):107-118; digital image, Northern Illinois University Libraries Illinois Historical Digitization Project, "Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society," [1950-2006] (http://dig.lib.niu.edu/ISHS/ : accessed 4 June 2012).

Hugh Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Harold Henderson, "Drainage tile, anyone?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Make the most of the ag census on methodology monday

Ever since I discovered the existence of agriculture schedules for the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses, I've been so amazed that I can know how many pigs my ancestors slopped and how much maple syrup they spent endless spring hours cooking down.

So I've promoted these schedules as a way to add flesh to a skeletal family tree. What was grown, or not grown on the farm; how it compared to its neighbors at the time; how it developed (or failed to develop) over time -- all can tell a lot about what it was like to grow up and live there. Now I have even more reasons and fewer excuses to use these scandalously under-used records.

The "fewer excuses" part is that Ancestry now has agriculture schedules on line for fourteen states including Illinois, Iowa, and Michigan. They're under the obtuse heading of "Selected US Federal Census Non-Population Schedules, 1850-1880," which is not included in the drop-down menu of other US censuses.

One caution if you haven't dealt with these in microfilm or hard copy before: In 1850 the entries for each farm are so numerous they stretch across two pages. On the left side of one page are the names and the first set of entries, and then on the back side of that page (the following image in Ancestry) are the remaining numbers. So to get all the good stuff you need to click forward and match up line numbers. (This also means that every knowledgeable citation to these records will refer to two page numbers, not just one!)

The "more reasons" part is that the agriculture schedule is not a perfect mirror of the population schedule. This means at least two things. One, some people show up there who own no property according to the population schedule (either a mistake was made or they are "managers"). Two, some people have their names grossly mangled in one schedule and not in another. A man who is probably not a relative of my wife (another story!) is indexed in Genesee County, New York, as "Rosabel" in the population schedule, but more accurately as "Roswell" in the agriculture schedule. I'm sure there's more, but the point remains the same: this data set is a must-do for any serious researcher.

JISHS resources, an idiosyncratic index #1

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

Spring 1950, volume 43(1)

Morgan County, 1876

Illinois State Fair, 1853 (Sangamon County)

Summer 1950, volume 43(2)

Warren County, 1800s

Fort Massac, 1750s-1760s

Moving on

Writing 55 years ago in the first chapter of The Age of Reform (pp. 41-42), "The Agrarian Myth and Commercial Realities," historian Richard Hofstadter tries to inoculate us against the "professional optimism" of the mug books. In this passage he's talking more about Yankees than German and other immigrants:

What developed in America was an agricultural society whose real attachment was not to the land but to land values. . . .

For farmers who had made out badly, the fresh lands may have served on occasion as a safety valve, but for others who had made out well enough on a speculative basis, or who were beginning a farming "career," it was equally a risk valve -- an opportunity to exploit the full possibilities of the great American land bubble. Mobility among farmers had serious effects upon an agricultural tradition never noted for careful cultivation: in a nation whose soil is notoriously heterogeneous, farmers too often had little chance to get to know the quality of their land; they failed to plan and manure and replenish; they neglected diversification for the one-crop system and ready cash. There was among them little attachment to land or locality; instead there developed the false euphoria of local "boosting," encouraged by railroads, land companies, and farmers themselves; in place of village contacts and communal spirit based upon ancestral attachments, there was professional optimism based upon hopes for a quick rise in values.

Read the whole thing.

Midwest in NGSQ

The 2009 winner of the National Genealogical Society's writing contest, Kay Haviland Freilich, CG, systematically checks out her ancestor's three-page life story and finds it mostly accurate in the December issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly: "Verifying the Autobiography of Mary (Seeds) Haviland." The family moved back and forth in a dizzying fashion, starting and ending in eastern Pennsylvania, but in the meantime frequenting Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, and southern California.

As NGSQ articles go this is a relaxing read in that there are no mind-bending methodologies or convoluted problems of identity. I learned that I had better never assume that when anybody moves, they move west! A nice touch is the agricultural information for the Paschal Seeds family from the 1885 Kansas state census; I would love to have seen how the Seeds family's farm (including a significant orchard) compared to their neighbors'.

Context files: Did your ancestor clear a Midwestern farm in the 1850s?

Economists Jeremy Atack and Robert Margo have confirmed what most of us might have expected: that the coming of the railroads in the 1850s did encourage Midwestern farmers to clear more land. That's the gist of their new paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research (full access by purchase or university affiliation).

The authors identified 278 counties in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri that didn't change their boundaries, and compared land-clearing activity in counties that got a railroad during the 1850s with those that didn't. For many reasons the figures can't be precise, but they figure that between 1/4 and 2/3 of the land-clearing activity was inspired by railroad access, and the cheaper transportation and higher crop prices that it promised.

"Whatever else might have led Midwestern farmers to undertake the back-breaking labor of clearing their land," they conclude, "no other single factor seems likely to be as important as the potential gains from trade deriving from the arrival of the Iron Horse."

Down on the farm

Most of our ancestors, and research targets in general, were farmers. For a sense of what they thought, or what "improvers" wanted them to think, the National Library of Agriculture has voluminous online resources: digitized searchable copies of the annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture 1862-1888, the Report of the Secretary of Agriculture 1889-1893, and the (newly available) Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture 1894-1937 and 1938-1992. Here's the overview of their list of publications. As near as I can tell, these are every-name searchable but as time goes on there tend to be fewer individuals named.

These are "context" or "background" resources, not likely to be means of finding or locating an elusive research target. But if you know your person was a farmer in this era, or a particularly skilled or specialized one, these books may well contain detailed information about their work. I found articles on celery culture in Kalamazoo, timber on the prairie, "sheep husbandry in the west" (1862 from Logan County, Illinois), and how Raleigh Township, Wake County, North Carolina was improving its roads in 1894. You just never know! Ongoing issues include stock improvement, fencing, and local farm organizations. Actually I got so distracted I almost didn't have time to write this post.

Hat tip Resource Shelf.

In the Illinois State Archives: even a blind squirrel finds the occasional acorn

I've long been a fan of the federal census agricultural schedules, and been sorry that they aren't available after 1880. But there's good news for those genealogists with post-1880 Illinois farmers in the tree: the Illinois State Archives' regional archives depositories (previously blogged here in January and here in February) have "agricultural statistic [sic] schedules" for ten counties, which cover non-census years and some well after 1880. Please note I haven't used these yet, so I'm going by the following description:

Schedules list 77 agricultural factors for each farmer in a township. Factors include: acres farmed; previous year’s crop yield; acres of pasture, woodland, uncultivated land, and city real estate owned by each farmer; the number of the various types of livestock owned, died, and killed; the amount of dairy products sold; the amount of wool shorn; the number of pounds of honey produced; with township summaries.

If that doesn't have you drooling, you're an impostor, not a genealogist. Most importantly, I suspect these will be reports of the actual farmers, not just landowners -- if that guess is true, this could be a gold mine for those researching transitory tenant farming families.

Counties available in their respective IRAD repositories and dates:

In northern Illinois, Carroll (1910-1912) , and Ogle (1891-1893).
In central Illinois, Christian (1881-1896), Henry (1877-1881), Macon (1878-1883), Macoupin (1881-1910), Montgomery (1877-1893), and Woodford (1877-1897).
In southern Illinois, Marion (1877-1878) and Williamson (1877-1886).

These came from the county clerks, so if you're working a county not listed above, perhaps they retain those records in a back room or basement somewhere. It can't hurt to ask.