It's Always Halloween With Scary Property Records

Every county is a little different, but some are more different than others. Last week was my first time researching in Fulton County, Illinois, which is one of the more different.

Most land records are indexed according to the number of the book and the number of the page where each record was recorded, such as Book 22, page 33. For some reason, Fulton County was not content with this simple, elegant, expandable, and durable system. The county started by giving each record a number of its own regardless of where it had been recorded. For the first few decades this seems to have worked fine. The land records (usually deeds) were entered in numerical order so it is no great trick to find the required record. When indexes were created, sometimes the clerks named the book but they always gave the unique property number.

Those who have worked with property records have already seen the impending train wreck. Later on, especially in the grantor indexes, book numbers were dispensed with. As the 19th century rolled on, for a variety of reasons documents were no longer entered in numerical order. No doubt some were recorded late; some may have been segregated in special books (for instance, Tax Deeds and Quit-Claim Deeds); some were recorded in books with preprinted forms while other books were all handwritten.

The result is an index that gives only the most general idea of where to find any particular deed. I hauled ten different large books off the shelves looking for a particular five-digit-numbered document. Sometimes I found the document, sometimes not. Most of the time the documents in any given book were themselves in numerical order regardless of how many numbers were skipped, but in a few cases I saw books where the occasional deed was out of numerical order. None of the books I saw contained their own indexes.

If you have property-owning research targets in the Spoon River Country, be prepared for a good long physical workout and an incomplete in-out table of deeds at the end of the day. One final touch: the grantor index through 1853 burned.

Of course, today's record custodians bear no responsibility for this malpractice. Those who do are presumably in a very warm place at the present time.




Harold Henderson, "It's Always Halloween With Scary Property Records," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 October 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New in the Archives and What You Can Do

The Indiana Historical Society processed 278 new collections in October and November, and mentioned 31 of them in the March/April issue of InPerspective. Here are half a dozen that caught my eye. For more information check out the online catalog.

• Civil War letters from James C. Stuart of Dearborn County, Erastus L. Pollett, and Samuel Sawyer.
• Scrapbooks, photos, and patient interviews from Billings General Hospital, Fort Benjamin Harrison (1941-1946), an orthopedic center for wounded soldiers.
• A 1916 "tour book" for Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
• 1968-1972 "hemodialysis scrapbooks" from Wallace S. Sims/Methodist Hospital.

Few of us have the time, proximity, or skill set to be involved with IHS acquisitions, but we can all help index the growing on-line collections at FamilySearch.org. Here are their indexing updates for the Midwest, with percentage arbitrated as of 9 March 2013:

Illinois, Chicago—Catholic Church Records, 1833–1910 [Part A], 20.00%

Indiana, Jefferson County Marriages, 1811-1959 [Part B], 28.87%
Indiana, Vermillion County Marriages, 1811–1959, 43.26%
Indiana, Vigo County Marriages,1811–1959, 3.73%
Indiana, Warrick County Marriages, 1811–1959, 46.26%
Indiana, Whitley County Marriages, 1811–1959, 21.72%

Ohio—County Births, 1856–1956 [Part C], 64.98%

Volunteer here.




Harold Henderson, "New in the Archives and What You Can Do," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18  March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

June Indiana Genealogist

Three big articles in the new issue of Indiana Genealogist, flagship publication of the Indiana Genealogical Society:

"Who Was Not Jessie's Father?" by Dawne Slater-Putt. The author, who is a Certified Genealogist, takes on puzzle of the parentage of Jessie Armentha Fordyce, daughter of Martha A. Saxon and, as it turns out, neither of the two men she married. Jessie was born 15 January 1883 in Miami County, and was five months old when her mother married Melchior Elsenhans.

"New History of the 99th Indiana Infantry," compiled by Meredith Thompson from the 1900 book of that title. In addition to a quick summary, the article reunites the sketches and photographs of some of the 942 men in the company. Company members came from the NW quadrant of the state.

In the regular "In-Genious" section, Marjorie Weiler-Powell distinguishes indexing, abstracting, extracting, transcribing, and translating.

In the latest news, a man from Danville, Illinois, is the first person to have three certified ancestors who served from Indiana in the Civil War, making him the first "triple" member of the Society of Civil War Families of Indiana.

A glimpse of the future, with free Ohio death certificates as well

The Ohio Historical Society has long held statewide death certificates from 1908 through 1953, indexed in two batches, 1913-1935 and 1936-1944; you're on your own if you need 1908-1912 or 1945-1953, and in any case actual copies cost $7 apiece sent by snail mail.

But Family Search Labs is on the case too. Their site is not for the timid: "FamilySearch Labs showcases new family history technologies that aren't ready for prime time. Your feedback will help us refine new ideas and bring them to market sooner. Have fun playing with these innovations and send your feedback directly to our development teams."

Your fun can include keeping up with their blog, volunteering to help index, or delving into Record Search (free registration required), where among other things you can search the full run of Ohio death certificates and view images of the originals for free, and browse the as yet unindexed 1905 state census of Wisconsin. I've happily made discoveries on both. They also have browseable the Illinois, Diocese of Belleville, Catholic Parish Records 1729-1956. That's a time span Midwesterners rarely get to work with.

Look who's blogging

The Indiana Genealogical Society has a blog. Actually it's almost a year old. AFAIK this is a rarity among genealogical societies -- it looks like Indiana is in the lead here. Do you know of others?

So far it's mostly devoted to queries, announcements of local meeting topics, and communications with the volunteers busy on the 1790-1857 Indiana marriage indexing project. (Remember when queries had to be squeezed into the confines of a print newsletter? IGS's policy is generous.)

And in a self-effacing way that Garrison Keillor would appreciate, so far it has scarcely been used to promote IGS's April 4-5 annual conference in Evansville, featuring J. Mark Lowe, CG, FUGA, who will earn his keep by giving four of the eight lectures, covering Kentucky, the internet, bad research, and WWI.