The ultimate Michigan Civil War resource

You're going to be sorry your ancestors didn't all flock to Michigan to join the Union Army...

I blundered into a fantastic archival collection on line at Seeking Michigan -- digital images of original Civil War records in 1486 folders, each containing (as far as I looked) between 25 and 85 documents. According to the collection description, "The records document the history of Michigan soldiers in the form of muster rolls, letters, lists of dead, monthly returns and other materials sent to the state Adjutant General during the war. Funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission." The Library of Michigan and the Archives of Michigan and the Leota and Talbert Abrams Foundation are involved.

If you have a research target who served in a Michigan unit in the war, and you know which one, you can conduct archival research on him from your desktop. (From the lists I saw it's obvious that many men not living in Michigan saw service there.) The interface isn't ideal, but if you click on printable version, that image is much easier to navigate and very detailed.

I can't tell if this is everything, but it's enormous. It's not indexed but it is organized by unit. Folder titles are searchable so browsing is probably the way to get started. To browse this collection, hit "advanced search," in that window move "Civil War Records" from the box on the left to the box on the right," and hit search. And pretty much wherever you land you'll find a surprise. I just found a bunch of Mexican War records!

Pullman

The Newberry Library's always-informative blog points to a recent Washington Post story about Pullman porters, and uses that news peg to remind us of the Newberry's gargantuan 2500-cubic-foot of Pullman company papers, most of which are open to researchers. Here is the 808-page guide to the collection (PDF). The company employed an unusually diverse workforce, so the genealogical possibilities are good if you know what you're doing.

My closest brush with the collection so far has been reading Susan Eleanor Hirsch's fascinating 2003 book based on it, After the Strike: A Century of Labor Struggle at Pullman. It's a history with a complex argument, and real people make regular appearances:

In 1940 the upholsterer Tillman Davis took action and accused his foreman of discrimination against black workers in assigning overtime. Davis, who had been hired as a helper-apprentice at the Calumet Repair Shop after the 1922 strike, experienced the best that Pullman repair shops had to offer black men....but he was not satisfied with less than complete equality. The shop manager threatened Davis with a thirty-day suspension for insubordination unless he retracted the charge and apologized for the language he used. Davis readily apologized for the way he had made his charge but refused to retract its substance. He accepted the thirty-day suspension and returned to the shop, a symbol of black assertion but also a reminder of management's power in the absence of a real union. {157-158}

How did you find THAT?

The Midwest turns up where you least expect it, like smack in the middle of the article, "Identifying Benjamin W. Cohen of New York and New Orleans," by Teri D. Tillman, CG, in the current National Genealogical Society Quarterly (member$hip required, earlier blogged here).This article is a wonderful genealogical tour de force. Her key piece of evidence that New York City doctor Benjamin W. Cohen and New Orleans dentist B. W. Cohen were the same person comes from -- a 10 Feb 1842 letter now in the archives of the University of Notre Dame! (page 252)

I love unconventional sources as much as the next guy, but what's the story behind the story? How did the author ever get the idea that it might be worth trolling the archives of a Midwestern Catholic university for information on a Jewish dentist in Louisiana?

Places you wish your relatives lived: Monroe County, Wisconsin

Ideally your relatives lived in a place small enough to create accessible individual records (such as obituaries) and large enough to know how to preserve them. Monroe County, Wisconsin, on Interstate 90 between Madison and La Crosse, is such a place. Its local history room is housed in half of the first floor of an old Masonic hall in downtown Sparta, the county seat -- conveniently across the street from the local library and county offices.

Don't let its small size deceive you. The MCLHR has a useful online presence including indices of local newspapers, court records, censuses, burials, and biographies -- which made my two half-days of research there far more productive than they would have been otherwise. A crew of volunteers overseen by Jarrod Roll continue adding to them. Off-line physical resources include plat books, yearbooks, church records, Sparta city directories going back (at intervals) as far as 1897, and an index to the Monroe County portion of Wisconsin's 1905 state census. For my money the jewel of the collection is a photocopy of the handwritten record of Sparta's Woodlawn Cemetery.

While you dig for ancestral gold, less document-oriented members of your party can explore the rest of the first floor, which houses a nicely designed local history museum, and then the upstairs, where the Deke Slayton Memorial Space & Bike Museum honors local astronaut and famous son Donald Kent Slayton.

(One warning: if you have a tracphone it will be useless until you drive about an hour east or west.)