Two provoking new books

Here's a book and a blog that might be of use to genealogists focused on the southern US and/or African-American ancestors. So far I have only seen the first blog post. Court records may be the least efficiently used of readily available sources in genealogy! And blogging is a cool way to tempt people to read your big book.


Speaking of books about history, on a whole 'nother level, here's a review of James C. Scott's Against the Grain, one that could turn your mind inside out.

Halls of Justice, New Durham Township, La Porte County, Indiana

The stories genealogists miss by not looking at court records:

Theodore Hagaman sued Lucas and Arthur Hixon for killing his dog and making his wife very ill (23 December 1879).

Davidson Brothers (dry goods and clothing) sued Mary Gutath for money she owed them (3 April 1880).

Lana Heiden sued Henry Bogue for bastardy (15 October 1881 -- before birth records were kept).

Albert Tuley sued William Tuley over a bay horse (15 December 1881).

William Webber bought two stoves -- a Loyal Acorn and a Black Acorn -- from Rathbone Sard and Co. in Chicago . . . and didn't pay (12 September 1882).

Polish workers Steppen Aushinsky and Josef Kusz (their names mangled in the record) sued Samuel Davis for their pay for cutting wood (14 May 1883).

Charley Brown failed to work on the road (6 July 1897).

Rosebell Livingston found a stray year-old heifer (4 April 1899).

Not many of Indiana's Justice of the Peace court records have survived; they may perhaps have been regarded as personal property rather than public property. One beat-up book ended up in the county clerk's office. Sometimes legible, it recorded cases heard by various justices between 1879 and 1906, most of them in New Durham Township (around Westville) in La Porte County.

I abstracted the cases and wrote the introduction, Callie McCune proofread them, and the Indiana Historical Society has published them as "La Porte County, New Durham Township Justice of the Peace Court Record Book Records, 1879-1906," part of Online Connections, the digital counterpart to their twice-yearly The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections published on paper. They're free to browse and search -- for those with New Durham research targets, or just for those with an interest in grass-roots litigation more than a century ago.






Harold Henderson and Callie McCune,  “La Porte County, New Durham Justice of the Peace Court Record Book Records, 1879-1906,″ Indiana Historical Society On-Line Connections, 2013 (http://www.indianahistory.org/our-services/books-publications/magazines/online-connections/regional/LaPorteCoNewDurhamJPRecs.pdf : viewed 13 October 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Halls of Justice, New Durham Township, La Porte County, Indiana," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Illinois Probates, Indianapolis Courts, and the Hoosier Genealogist

Included in the new Hoosier Genealogist: Connections (Fall/Winter 2012), published twice a year by the Indiana Historical Society, are Randy Mills on writing memoirs ("Give yourself permission to write that lousy first draft"), Christina R. Bunting on the old French Lick resort, more on John Wooden's boyhood, and Cathy Callen on mysterious relative (or is it relatives?) Allen H. Neff.

The Neff article is interesting in that the author still has questions about the fellow's identity, and a new on-line index from the Indiana State Digital Archives might help by making Marion County court records more accessible.

Meanwhile, west of the Wabash, FamilySearch now has on line more than 1.1 million images of probate records from 44 Illinois counties (none of the big ones unless you count Rock Island and Champaign)! These are browseable and include the print indexes, but the images themselves are not indexed, so it takes some work to get to the original images.



Harold Henderson, "Illinois Probates, Indianapolis Courts, and the Hoosier Genealogist," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Mistake You Can Only Make in Indiana

There's a twenty-year blip in Indiana's judicial history, from 1853 to 1873, when there were two courts of original jurisdiction, the Circuit Court and the Court of Common Pleas. The Court of Common Pleas in Indiana lasted only twenty years, during which time it adjudicated many a divorce, probate, and other civil case. But it has been a long time since any living person could recall the existence of that court, and as a result the valuable records it created during those decades often go uninvestigated. (Just last week I sent a puzzled researcher to the records of this court, where he found the information he'd been looking for elsewhere.) There was a lot going on in Indiana during those years, and a good bit of it happened in this court.

This is something Hoosier genealogists just have to know, because few if any employees in the county clerk's office do. For a more detailed breakdown, see John J. Newman's 16-page pamphlet, Research in Indiana Courthouses: Judicial and Other Records.




John J. Newman, Research in Indiana Courthouses: Judicial and Other Records (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1981).

Harold Henderson, "The Mistake You Can Only Make in Indiana," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Subterranean Direct Evidence: A Research Travelogue

In my experience, aspiring genealogists who read the top journals would love to read more than the polished, logical summary. They also want a taste of the research process that made the polished, logical summary possible. Here's one taste, involving my mother-in-law's great-grandfather's sister Elizabeth Bassett, who married Harry Porter. In this case finding Harry's origins was the problem.

I met up with some other folks on line who had also been researching Harry for a while. They had been using original records and had found much about his life in western New York and later western Illinois (Fulton County). Better still, they had some good clues indicating that he might well be the same Harry Porter who had grown up in Jefferson County, New York, with half a dozen brothers and sisters, none of whom had migrated to Illinois with him or had any known contact with him in later life.

Was Harry of Jefferson County the same man as the Harry who married Elizabeth and lived in Illinois? There might be enough indirect evidence to make a case, but there was plenty more research to do. Jefferson County Harry's father, John S. Porter, died in 1840, by which time Elizabeth's Harry had settled in Illinois. Any record that named Jefferson County Harry's residence would pretty well seal the deal one way or another.

Of particular interest, my new-found cohorts had unearthed an on-line newspaper item stating that two of Jefferson County Harry's sisters had received land from their father John S. Porter in a partition suit in the Jefferson County Court of Common Pleas. (Partition is a court case in which heirs ask that the decedent's real estate be divided among them.)

I consulted a researcher in Salt Lake City, who located the only deed Harry ever executed in Jefferson County. Shortly after father John's death, Jefferson County Harry sold all his rights to John's land to his sister Lydia Maine. Unfortunately the deed did not say where Harry was living at the time.

With this background knowledge I went to Jefferson County with two specific research targets:

(1) the loose papers in John S. Porter's probate, which should contain a list of heirs and a receipt from Harry, either of which might say where he was living; and

(2) the partition suit, which might also name Harry in some useful way.

Target #1 didn't work out. John's probate did list Harry as a recipient of a share of the estate, but it did not say where he was living at the time. And I found no receipt from Harry at all, although there should have been one. Probates can be like that sometimes.

That left Target #2. I had hoped to find a row of bound court books from the period, with in-book indexes. No such luck. The individual court sessions were each bound separately with no hard covers and no indexes, and with the three different kinds of courts (General Sessions, Common Pleas, and Oyer and Terminer) mixed together. Worse yet, according to the labels on the archival folders, there were no Common Pleas sessions for 1840 in the box at all!

Never trust a label when you can look. I looked at a file labeled General Sessions. Halfway through the writing was upside down. I flipped the booklet over and saw the "back" page was labeled "Common Pleas." The courts had saved paper by using the same set of pages for both courts' records, but only one was mentioned in the folder label. The needed Common Pleas sessions were there after all, stored archivally and in chronological order.

After that scare, I soon found records of two key court sessions: one where the court received the Porter heirs' petition for a partition of John S. Porter's land and named commissioners to divide it up, and another where the court approved the commissioners' proposal. Sister Lydia was to have two shares, and Harry's name was not mentioned. Having seen the deed, I knew why, but I still didn't know if this was our Harry or not.

While the court session records were being copied, I thought hard and realized I had one last option. I asked if they had any loose papers from Common Pleas, in the hopes (a) that the papers might include the actual petition the heirs had submitted, and (b) that if they did, the petition might contain more detail than the court's ruling had. I was soon rewarded with a box tight-packed with a year's worth of "trifold" papers from various cases, as they had been submitted to the court 172 years ago and then folded for storage. They were called "law papers," so there was no assurance that they would even include petitions.

Like the cases themselves, the trifolds had no index, but at least they were in chronological order. I worked my way through November and into December. (Time was running out in my world too.) But then, there it was: not one but two copies of the petition the heirs had filed with the court. And it named one of the heirs as "Harry Porter of Farmington Fulton County Illinois." O happy day!

One moral of this story: it would have done no good at all for me to go to Jefferson County "looking for Harry Porter." Genealogy at this stage requires knowing much more than the target's name -- the family, the type of record, the approximate date, the name of the court, the process involved in the original court proceeding -- enough that you can get to the unindexed records, keep going, and hopefully do some good with them.


Harold Henderson, "Subterranean Direct Evidence: A Research Travelogue," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Tales from the Courthouse

My article with this title has been published at Archives.com. The stories are fragmentary, some funny, some horrific. If you don't use court records regularly, check it out and see what you've been missing!

Previous Archives.com articles are listed here; the full roster is here.

Every name index to first La Porte County IN court records

(cross-posted on La Porte County Genealogical Society blog)

UNUSUAL EARLY INDIANA COURT INDEX NOW AVAILABLE

In Court In La Porte is an every-name index to the first legal proceedings in La Porte County, Indiana, containing more than 800 distinct surnames. Compiled by Harold Henderson, it indexes every personal, business, and place name mentioned in Complete Record Book A (June 1833 to April 1837), Judgment Docket A (June 1833 to June 1838), and Minute Record A (June 1833 to October 1836). A very limited amount of relevant genealogical information is included, such as when an individual stood bail for someone else's payment or performance of a duty.

This book is a finding aid, not a substitute for the records themselves. The original handwritten books (with handwritten indexes of plaintiffs only) are in the office of the La Porte County Clerk and should be consulted for legal and genealogical information. Also in the clerk's office are microfilms of the “loose papers” for certain cases.

The legal proceedings offer glimpses of many aspects of life on the frontier more than 170 years ago: fights, liquor sales, gambling parties, road building, timber cutting, slander, divorce, death, murder, and – above all – debt and the repayment of debt. These proceedings may also provide unique information on the whereabouts of early settlers who do not appear in census or property records. It is hoped that this index will encourage genealogists to make court records a regular part of their research.

In Court In La Porte: An Every-Name Index to the First Legal Proceedings in La Porte County, Indiana (La Porte: compiler via blurb.com, 2011). 246 pages, soft cover, 5x8. $20, Indiana sales tax included; 25% donated to La Porte County Genealogical Society. Shipping & handling $5 if needed. Available from the compiler at hhsh@earthlink.net, or with slightly different pricing through blurb.com.

A professional writer since 1979 and professional genealogist since 2009, Harold Henderson has published genealogical articles in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Utah, and the National Genealogical Society Magazine. He maintains a blog, “Midwestern Microhistory.” He serves on the boards of the La Porte County Genealogical Society and the Association of Professional Genealogists; moderates the Transitional Genealogists Forum on-line discussion list; and is the Indiana Genealogical Society county genealogist for La Porte.

La Porte County Indiana commitment book

(Cross-posted on La Porte County Genealogical Society blog)

SEVENTY-TWO YEARS OF COMMITMENT RECORDS IN LA PORTE COUNTY

As government and society evolved in the 1800s, it was the thinking that government had a proper role in providing for the good of those who were out of the norm or from whom society needed protection. As a result, Indiana built prisons, insane asylums, and homes and schools for the feeble minded, the deaf, the blind, the epileptic, and the orphan. These governmental actions left a paper trail in the courthouses. A new book abstracts these records in La Porte County. The earliest entry of the 565 entries found was 13 October 1848. No records after 1920 were abstracted.

The compilers searched numerous records in the county clerk's office, including Court of Common Pleas Order books A-E and additional books covering 1869 to 1873; all Circuit Court Civil Order books from B to Z and 1 to 40; and Insanity Record Books 6, 7, 11, 12, and 13. Civil Order Book A and Insanity Record Books 1-5 and 8-10 are missing.

Pictures of pertinent Indiana institutions are included.

_________

La Porte County, Indiana, Commitments to Benevolent, Educational, and Reformatory Institutions and Related Guardianships, 1848-1920, compiled by Dorothy Palmer and Mary Wenzel (La Porte: La Porte County Genealogical Society, 2011). 98 pages, soft cover, comb bound, 8 1/2 x 11. $20 through http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~inlcigs/booksales.htm

St. Louis Court Records from 1787 to 1875 on line -- well, some of them

The Scout Report highlights an interesting online resource for Midwestern researchers whose people of interest may have stopped and stayed awhile at the gateway to the west (and the metropolis of southern Illinois), St. Louis. It's the St. Louis Circuit Court Historical Records Project from Washington University. Cases include civil, criminal and chancery (equity) actions and are searchable by plaintiff, defendant, year, action, and case notes. Some documents are as old as 1787 and some as recent as 1875, but most are from 1804 to 1835.

This is not primarily intended as a genealogical resource, since it is not an every-name index, and since from using the search engine it would appear that the cases available are limited to those categorized as having to do with four predefined categories: Lewis & Clark, freedom suits (involving slaves or those threatened with enslavement), the fur trade, and Native Americans.

Coles County Illinois Court Cases on line

Thanks to the Legal History Blog, I just heard of an online index or database to 19th-century circuit court cases in Coles County, Illinois -- an "ongoing project" whose web site describes as "current" the team from 2002-2003! (The internet has a history -- who knew?)

The index is or was the product of "an on-going investigation by student researchers and history professors at Eastern Illinois University and elsewhere." They're identifying and abstracting (as genealogists would call it) and indexing criminal and civil cases from Coles County from 1830 to 1899. These files are conveniently held by the Illinois Regional Archives Depository at Eastern Illinois University's library. According to the IRAD inventory, its holdings include circuit court case files 1832-1890, chancery files 1835-1900 (seemingly overlapping with the previous), and the chancery record 1849-1915 (these would be the court's bound record books).

The web site also includes several other valuable resources for researchers: maps and history of Coles County (which included current Douglas and Cumberland counties at various times prior to 1859), a list of the five "top" county cases 1830-1900, and samples of court documents (selected from later years when preprinted forms were in use).

The index itself currently includes cases as early as 1831 (which are cited to IRAD files, so sue me) and as late as 1906. Within those years the coverage is quite uneven, ranging from no cases at all for the years of 1879, 1880, and 1890, to over 100 cases for each of 1857, 1858, 1859, and 1865. CCLHP's "results" page essays a few generalizations from it, but genealogists and social historians might want to exercise caution in doing so, since the database is clearly not comprehensive, and there's no way to tell whether it's representative of all the cases in that 70-year period.

For each indexed case you can find the date of the underlying incident; the date the case was filed; the case type; the names, sexes, and literacy statuses of the plaintiffs and defendants; and a one-sentence description of the issues involved.

EIU's IRAD already has a separate and somewhat more terse index of cases heard in Mattoon's short-lived Court of Common Pleas from 1869 to 1873; its records were merged in with the circuit court after that time. But at this point IRAD has no reference pointer to the CCLHP index. You just have to know.

The CCLHP database is intended for "high school students, undergraduates, graduates, genealogists, and professional historians," but while extremely valuable it is not ideal for genealogists, in that (like the Mattoon index) it only indexes plaintiffs and defendants.

In my own work -- outside of probates or partition suits -- when seeking to identify a difficult person I would most want to know who stood up in court to guarantee his bail or payment of a fine, or who he stood up for. It's appropriate that a work of historical indexing should observe the standards of that discipline, but an every-name index is still the genealogical standard.

Methodology Monday with more spiral research

The research day that rudely pushed blog posting aside also provided some fodder. One of today's projects involves several lawsuits with almost two dozen people suing and being sued, many of them related and the rest probably so. The lawsuits themselves appear to have vanished from official custody at some point in the past century or two, so it's especially important to glean all possible information from the relevant property records. (Naturally the lawsuits were about property and inheritance!)

The first time I hit the deed books I didn't yet have all the family names; when I returned with a full list of names (from one especially informative deed) I found four more deeds. One had actually been recorded in response to the conclusion of one of the lawsuits. Another was a deed of trust spelling out various descendants' shares resulting from a partition suit (one of the missing lawsuits). Now those deeds have suggested that certain additional lawsuits indexed in the clerk's office may be relevant. Hopefully they have not absconded too.

We always berate ourselves for having to go back -- and we should if it was just inadequate preparation -- but often doing so is part of a natural and necessary learning process. We are chronological animals, and as someone said, time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen all at once.

Genealogy is everywhere

Cynthia doesn't post real often at ChicagoGenealogy, but when she does you can be sure it's a good one. Yesterday guest blogger Barbara offered a finding aid under the title, "Adoption Research: Using the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin to Find Birth Names." Check it out -- it looks like it will be more useful the closer you know the date.

During my years of actual employment on the near north side, I often saw bundles of the latest CDLB being wheeled hither and yon on the sidewalks, and occasionally browsed an issue. It never dawned on me what a useful resource it might be for adoption and other Chicago legal matters relating to genealogy. Do you have an item in your past, long taken for granted, that might be as useful as this one?

September's Indiana Genealogist

"The Indenture of Harriett 'Hattie' Moss Dunihoo," by Randi Richardson.

"Juror Lists, Marion County, 1835," submitted by Ron Darrah from "numerous Marion County Circuit Court materials processed recently by volunteers at the Indiana State Archives."

[continued] "New History of the 99th Indiana Infantry," submitted by Meredith Thompson.

"Lake County Jurors, 1837," submitted by Marlene Polster.

"In-Genious: Finding Luther Martin's Grandfather: Valuable Clues in Newspaper Article," by Annette Harper. Census entries and newspaper articles make the case that he was George Martin; "land transfers were not searched, but might reveal a transfer to Nelson from his father."

Reasonably exhaustive Thursday in Common Pleas

What does it mean to complete a "reasonably exhaustive search," as required by one of the five prongs of the Genealogical Proof Standard? When this was debated last year on the Association of Professional Genealogists mailing list, one working definition came up: if you described your search, and if a top genealogist said, "But did you look at X?", and you hadn't looked at X, then your search was not reasonably exhaustive. Even though this reminded me of the joke that my dad, a math teacher, liked to tell ("Mathematics is what mathematicians do"), it actually makes some kind of sense.

Hoosier researchers can add an obscure Indiana court to the list of things to look at. From 1853 to 1873 Indiana counties had, in addition to the circuit courts that persist to this day, a Court of Common Pleas, which had jurisdiction over probate cases as well as law and equity cases and criminal matters (except felonies and debts over $1,000). (A brief accessible description is on page 377 of the History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, at Google Book Search, although I think its description of the jurisdiction is incomplete.) So if you know your Indiana research target was in court during the decades surrounding the Civil War -- or if you hope he or she was because you need the records, any records -- your search is not going to be reasonably exhaustive until you ask too see those order books and case files ("loose papers").

I have seen Common Pleas order books interfiled with Circuit Court books in clerk's offices that were otherwise models of conscientious record maintenance and preservation. From one decade to the next, does anyone know to ask for them? They may be even more neglected than mortgage books (as compared to deed books).

Secrets of eastern Indiana

Don't overlook college campuses in your tour d'horizon of local resources. I'm not thinking of just the archives and special collections for the moment (although I did blog one set here), but the humble catalog itself. For instance, Ball State University in Muncie has possessed itself of several series of microfilmed records from Delaware County, Indiana: marriage, property, probate, and circuit court order books. And that library is usually open until 3 am, which is more than you can say for the off-campus variety! These goodies are collectively numbered 2303 in Bracken Library's microfilm numbering system.