Postpone that genealogy road trip . . .

. . . and take a good long look at your target records and counties in the Family History Library catalog.

If the records you want are on films that have been digitized (those are camera icons in the right-hand "format" column), then you may get to have a genealogy staycation instead.

I just viewed the index books (also digitized) and pulled two key deeds for an ancestor in Ashtabula County, Ohio, whose property was sold to satisfy a court decree in 1844 (after he had paid the then-princely sum of $2400 for it six years earlier). Most likely he borrowed money on it and couldn't pay, but we'll see.

Actually I still need that road trip, because the underlying court records -- which hopefully will explain how he got into this fix -- were not filmed, and due to the current Microfilmpocalypse may never be. But now I can zero in on them instead. Jefferson, Ohio, is nice in the summer.

from OZinOH  per Creative Commons 2.0
www.flickr.com/photos/75905404@N00/1317676029

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.

Giving Thanks for Pennsylvania Deeds

Many genealogists think of Pennsylvania and New York as exceptionally difficult places to research. But really, they are just places with different sets of strengths and weaknesses in records than what we're used to. As I was reminded last week, one asset many 200-year-old Pennsylvania deeds have that I rarely see in the Midwest is a tendency to recite the chain of title, or at least part of it. And when the chain of title is also a family tree, what's not to like?

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Deeds 24:374, Moor to Hamilton, 4 August 1821; Department of Real Estate, Pittsburgh.

Harold Henderson, "Giving Thanks for Pennsylvania Deeds," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Professional Work: 96 Deeds, 204 Years

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the second article in the June NGS Quarterly (free with National Genealogical Society membership) is the longest article the journal has ever published. With 21 maps in 18 pages, it's the most visual genealogy argument I've ever seen in print.

The article is a collaboration between the late Birdie Monk Holsclaw, CG, and her literary executor (and NYGBR editor) Karen Mauer Green, CG. It is a fine memorial in itself and one can only hope that there might be more.

George Hachenberger (d. 1830) of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, married Anna Maria Hollinger, but the name is not distinctive enough in that time and place to identify her parents. Anna Maria was identified by tracing the land her husband was reported to own on neighbors' deeds, which in the process revealed much more genealogical information.

To make the case, 96 deeds involving neighboring properties were winnowed down to ten. Each of those ten purchases is portrayed in an individual map and then fitted in to the neighborhood on a second map. But the most hair-raising phrase in the entire article is the statement that the ten deeds required to make the case were recorded between 1766 and . . . 1980.

One moral of the story (the authors give seven): you can't do brick wall research in Pennsylvania and other state-land states unless you're prepared to plat metes-and-bounds deeds.



Karen Mauer Green and Birdie Monk Holsclaw, "'Beginning at a Black Oak...': Hachenberger Evidence from a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Neighborhood Reconstruction," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 100 (June 2012): 105-22.

Harold Henderson, "Professional Work: 96 Deeds, 204 Years," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

William Berry: Where There's a Will There's a Deed

Archives.com has just posted my digest version of research on William Berry (1753-1839), who was born in Rhode Island, served in the American Revolution from New York, and lived much of his life in and around Stephentown, Rensselaer County, New York, and Hancock, Berkshire County, Massachusetts. The first installment of the full account was published in NEHGS's American Ancestors Journal last fall, with the second and final installment this fall. Berry made his will in Allegany County, New York, in 1839, naming seven children and ten grandchildren. Deeds made in the decades following his death enable us to identify twenty-three additional grandchildren.

Surnames involved include Bliven, Coleman, Daboll, Green, Hackett, Hungerford, Monroe, Palmer, Parks, Potter, Saunders, Sprague, Sumner, Swartwout, Trask, and Walrath. Some stayed in New York; others went west to Illinois, Wisconsin, and beyond.

Studying those records was a bit like walking into a party where everybody knows everybody else and assumes you do too. Even though this party was more than 150 years old, enough of the participants were willing to "talk" so that eventually most of it made sense. There are still some descendants on the loose!


[Note to fanatics: this is my sixth article on Archives, but the site lists only the five most recent under my name. The first one, no longer listed in that way, is "Indirect Evidence to the Rescue," 25 August 2011.]


Harold Henderson, "William Berry (1753-1839) and His Children and Grandchildren in Massachusetts and New York," part 1 of 2, American Ancestors Journal, third annual supplement to The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 165 (October 2011): 368-78.


Harold Henderson, "William Berry: Where There's a Will There's a Deed," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Required reading for those who don't use deeds

Among its many other offerings, the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center has a blog. Recently librarian Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, contributed a two-part post, "Digging into Deed Records," full of examples of genealogical information of all kinds that can be found in deeds -- and in some cases can only be found there.

IMO -- she didn't put it this way at all! -- genealogists who don't use this readily available record type are cheating themselves, and quite possibly creating their own brick walls.

Genealogy in social media

A wee bit of civil controversy appeared on the Association of Professional Genealogists mailing list last week (under the heading, "Facebook for Genealogists genealogywise"), as posters took note of the increased popularity of Facebook among our crowd, and the appearance of Genealogywise, which is basically facebook for genealogists.

Do these sites add value beyond sociability and (for practicing professionals) exposure? (There are other sites but I haven't done them -- in fact, the burden of having to track multiple social media was one issue discussed.)

On Facebook, the Geneabloggers group distributes blogging tips and invitations to various carnivals, which are convenient although probably just as doable by e-mail.

On Genealogywise, which is pretty new, the groups so far consist of people listing their surnames or asking if anyone has heard of anything that will solve their problem. For those who are (in Tom Jones's juxtaposition) more interested in genealogy than in ancestors, it was interesting to see Ginger Smith's post in the Indiana Genealogy group of some images from the handwritten grantors index to Putnam County deeds, Volume 3, April 1824 - Aug 1863, for surnames beginning with the letters T-Z. She invites visitors to post their transcriptions.

Of course, it's not like Indiana doesn't already have a major transcription project under way, but doing this kind of thing on Genealogywise might attract some new participants . . . and get people thinking about the stupendous mountain of valuable records out there (the deeds themselves) that are undigitized and likely to remain so.