Past Prophecies

Morris Sleight, writing in his diary, probably on 30 June 1834:

"Chicago is thought by the Inhabiters is to be[come] the Largest city in the world. I think it is entirely overrated . . . it is a Low Muddy Place and no country within 30 miles to Back it."

He wrote letters (transcribed here) and settled in Napervville.


Morris Sleight papers (1834-1837 & 1850-1854; 1953), diaries, folder 9 of 11, book no. 2, entry preceding 3 July 1834; Chicago History Museum, Chicago.

Harold Henderson, "Past Prophecies," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Lillian is back!

It's time for a second peek into the daily life of 90-some years ago in the rural northwestern corner of Illinois, in the second volume of Lillian's Diaries: Whispers from Galena's Past, Volume 2, 1920-1925. So far I have only been able to find volume 1 on Amazon; volume 2 should be there soon. My review of volume 1, with some thoughts on what diaries do and don't give us, was published in the Utah Genealogical Association's Crossroads quarterly in December (available here to members).

According to Lillian's editor and cousin Sheryl Trudgian Jones, this volume has more researcher-friendly appendages than the first, including a map of Jo Daviess County, Ilinois; a glossary; and hundreds of surnames from the diaries. Excerpts from the diaries also appear in Jones's blog, "Leaves on the Trudgian Tree," as I noted in an earlier post.

The problem of diaries

Diaries are original sources from an eyewitness. Why aren't they always as illuminating as we would like? Maybe they lack that thing we call "perspective" . . . or context. I was provoked to think about them when I reviewed Lillian's Diaries: Whispers from Galena's Past, which recounts seven years in northwestern Illinois' Jo Daviess County from the point of view of Lillian Trudgian, a young farm woman. The review is just out in the December 2010 issue of Crossroads, the ambitious quarterly of the Utah Genealogical Association. (More on the issue later.)

Then I was provoked to think some more when reading Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. He called two war diarists to witness the problematic nature of their creations (pages 310-311). Playwright Lillian Hellman hoped to preserve important experiences in her 1944 diary, but later found that they had somehow omitted "what had been most important to me, or what the passing years have made important." And RAF flyer Robert Kee later reflected on his own diary: "From all the quite detailed evidence of these diary entries I can't add up a very coherent picture of how it really was to be on a bomber squadron in those days."

Sometimes up close and personal can be too close -- or it needs to be supplemented with more.

Indiana Genealogist March 2010

The new quarterly issue of Indiana Genealogist has some treats -- a nice going-away present from editor Annette Harper, who has acquired a job.

Judy Lee transcribed a Civil War journal of unknown origin and has found evidence to attribute it to Gillis J. McBain (1829-1914), a Canadian who died in Idaho. In between, he served as sergeant and sergeant major in Company G of Indiana's 73rd infantry. Like most 19th-century diaristsm McBain is laconic and rarely tells us what we most want to know. Nevertheless he still conveys the soldier's unique mixture of boredom, discomfort, and terror. As a postscript, there' s a shorter journal of his train travel west in 1882.

James R. Miller offers an introduction to philatelic genealogy in Indiana, which consists of using stamps and envelopes as evidence, not trying to determine the family tree of a given stamp. It reminded me uneasily of the old envelopes we destroyed as children in the name of "collecting" the stamps stuck to them.

Jay B. Wright does a clear and concise job of distinguishing between the related but distinct sins of plagiarism and copyright violation. You can do both, or neither, and you can also commit either one without committing the other. Read it, don't try it!

Deal with it: the 20th century is history

One way to make sure you have blog fodder is to transcribe and annotate a diary or series of letters. That's being done quite a bit, and I just learned of a quintessentially Midwestern version being done by Sherry Jones of Michigan. "Leaves on the Trudgian Tree" follows the diaries oft her 20th-century relative Lillian Trudgian of rural Galena, Jo Daviess County, in the extreme upper-left-hand corner of Illinois. In recent episodes the family cans catsup by the quart, spends an entire morning doing laundry, goes shopping in Dubuque, and picks up "crabs" at a neighbor's. (Crabapples, that is.) Lillian's 1913-1931 diaries require more annotation than you might think!

It's fun to read the entries, but there's also a genealogical reason to do so, unless your farm people from a century or so ago also kept extensive diaries. You'll want to bookmark this as a reference for your "context file" when writing the family history.

BTW, the surname is from Cornwall.

Bookends Friday: letters from St. Clair County, Illinois

From the September issue of the St. Clair County (Illinois) Genealogical Society Newsletter, two new books by Stephen W. Reiss. I have not seen these but how could anyone with southwestern Illinois connections go far wrong?

It Takes a Matriarch: 780 Family Letters from 1852 to 1888 Including Civil War, Farming in Illinois, Life in St. Louis, Life in Sacramento, Life in the Theater, Wagon Making in Davenport, and the Lost Family Fortune -- letters to Margaret Basler Reiss Ebert.

Quilter, Granger, Grandma, Matriarch: Life on the Reiss Family Farm 1949-1953 St,. Clair County, Illinois -- diaries of Catherine "Katie" Reiss.

More information at the publisher's web site.

Bookends Friday: Moravians in the Upper Ohio Valley in the 1700s

A recent review on H-Net alerts us to the 2005 book The Moravian Mission Diaries of David Zeisberger, 1772-1781, translated by Julie Tomberlin Weber and edited by Hermann Wellenreuther and Carola Wessel. I haven't seen it, but it appears to be as much about the Delaware Indians as about the Moravian sect, and it includes both genealogical and historical material. From Elisabeth W. Sommer's review:

"In addition to the diaries themselves, Wellenreuther and Wessel include an eighty-seven-page introduction, copious notes, a list of all congregants of the mission settlements, the minutes of two mission conferences, a set of the statutes governing one Indian mission, and the minutes of an Indian council held at Detroit in 1781. They also include a series of maps, but unfortunately, as is often the case in publications today, most readers will need a magnifying glass to make good use of them.

"The lengthy introduction, written by Wellenreuther, contains a section on 'The Diary as Source,' a very thoughtful analysis of the challenges posed by the diaries." If you have people in this far eastern edge of what was not yet the Midwest, this sure sounds like a must-have.

Midwestern genealogy in New England Ancestors

New England Ancestors is to the New England Historic and Genealogical Register as the NGS Magazine is to the National Genealogical Society Quarterly -- more popular, less formal and scholarly. NEA and NGSM have less prestige but wider appeal and more flexibility. This quarter NEA is featuring western New York (an important and complicated feeder to the Midwest among other things), but two articles touch immediately on our area of focus:

The regular feature "Diaries at NEHGS," by archivist/editor Robert Shaw, excerpts and puts in contxt the diaries of Diadema (Bourn) Swift (1812-1888), who after enduring her husband's long absences on whaling voyages, after his death emigrated to Benton County, Indiana, and then to Des Moines, Iowa, in hopes that her sons would not follow the sea.

Jim Boulden takes on a difficult task in "Betting on Land in Missouri: A Family Story" -- chronicling his Ely and Hyde ancestors' rarely investigated pioneering of Marion, Alexandria, and St. Francisville in northeastern Missouri (just across the Mississippi River from Illinois). Previous family genealogists ignored failure and defeat, and it can be difficult to research when the records were lost with the enterprise. But a family history that is all good news is unfaithful to the reality of our ancestors' lives.