New on Midwest Roots

I've added nine more free lookups at Midwest Roots for a total of sixteen.

LA PORTE COUNTY

* La Porte, Indiana, city directories for 1971, 1984, 1987.

* Index to the Justice of the Peace records for New Durham Township, La Porte County, Indiana,1879-1906. (Surnames listed on web site.)

* Harold Henderson, comp., In Court In La Porte: An Every-Name Index to the First Legal Proceedings in La Porte County, Indiana [prior to 1836] (La Porte: Blurb.com, 2011).

INDIANA

* DAR-transcribed St. Joseph County, Indiana, marriage records 1830-1855, 1886-1906 (not the originals).

* Eric Pumroy with Paul Brockman, A Guide to Manuscript Collections of the Indiana Historical Society and Indiana State Library (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1986).

* Charles Alexander Martin, ed., Alumnal Record DePauw University (Greencastle IN: DePauw, 1910).

* Dorothy L. Riker, comp., Genealogical Sources Reprinted from the Genealogy Section of Indiana Magazine of History (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1979).

* Ronald L. Baker and Marvin Carmony, Indiana Place Names (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975)

ILLINOIS

* Almost 100 Flint-Thrall family letters 1870-1898, mostly from, to, and about southern Illinois.

* 1931 yearbook of Tilden Technical High School, Chicago.

* Edward Callary, Place Names of Illinois (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

MICHIGAN

* Walter Romig, Michigan Place Names (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).

BEYOND

* Margaret R. Waters, Dorothy Ruiker, and Doris Leistner, Abstracts of Obituaries in the Western Christian Advocate 1834-1850 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1988).

* Karen Livsey, Western New York Land Transactions, 1804-1824, Extracted from the Archives of the Holland Land Company (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1991).


Harold Henderson, "New on Midwest Roots," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Letters from Illinois to England 1850

More than a quarter of the current 64-page Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly is given over to letters describing northern Illinois as of 160 years ago. "The Letters of John Wightwick of Tenterden, Kent, England and St. Charles, Kane County, Illinois," was contributed by descendant Lillian S. DeHart of New York.

Part of the family emigrated in 1850; the eight letters were mostly written in that year but extend up to 1853 when some of the family were in Chicago. The writers exchanged family information, Methodist exhortations, descriptions of American life, and pleas for loans so that they could not only purchase land but get a house and fence on it. The Americans, John commented 10 August 1850,

generally have three meals a day, animal food at every meal. They seldom have anything cold, Their stoves are exceedingly hand and convenient. Can bake bread or cakes in a very short time, fit for the table in an hour for instance. As the farmers keep cows and poultry there are many eggs, custard pudding, cream etc. etc., ice cream etc. . . . As this part of Illinois is an infant state there is not much fruit at present. The trees are all young, . . . They do not farm very well. They do not plough their ground very well, plough only about 3 or 4 inches in general and harrow very little so their land is very rough . . . they will find they must manage their land instead of throwing it away instead.

Clearly just transcribing the letters was a labor of love, as they were written cross-hatch style first across the paper and then up and down over the previous writing. Annotations are sparse.

The whole business of publishing old letters tends to be a bit random, and this reader would have appreciated more annotations as to who was speaking to whom in the family, and any other Illinois and England context that was known. But as I know from working in this genre, that is a pit as bottomless as genealogy itself!

Those of us with less articulate English ancestors in the Midwest at this date will greatly appreciate this glimpse of how the Wightwicks saw their new home. Join ISGS and get your copy of the whole thing!


Lillian S. DeHart, comp., "The Letters of John Wightwick of Tenterden, Kent, England and St. Charles, Kane County, Illinois," Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 13-30, 48.

Harold Henderson, “Letters from Illinois to England 1850,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific article if you mention this post online.]

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.

Wisconsin leapfrogs into the 21st century

I hope someone more cosmopolitan can correct me, but isn't Wisconsin the first state genealogy society to put its flagship publication on line? The move was dictated by finances but it's also a visual upgrade, and it coincides with a push to publish readable articles in addition to compiled and abstracted records. It's a combined January-April 2009 issue, 52 pages in PDF format available to members. Join at Wisconsin State Genealogical Society. Included in this quarter's contents:

"Dane County -- Inventory from the Lower and Upper McFarland Cemetery"

"Fond du Lac County -- Rienzi Cemetery Study: A Search for Unmarked Graves," by new co-editor Tracy Reinhardt. Another precedent question: who else, where else, has tried to study how many unmarked burials a particular cemetery contains?

"Fond du Lac County -- FDL Public Library Seefeld Local History Room"

"Marquette County -- Thomas Mozley Writes from the Wisconsin Frontier: 'If I am spared I shall see for myself,'" by Harold Henderson (that's me)

"Wood County -- Governor Awards Marshfield Public Library for Genealogy Database"

Winter 08-09 Chicago Genealogist

From the current issue of Chicago Genealogist:

"Illinois Staats Zeitung Translations," translated from the German by Virginia Dick and submitted by Gail Santroch. First of a series, obituaries and news items 1861 through March 1872.

"Of Wealth and War: Samuel Lowe Writes Home," by Harold Henderson. Identifying the people Samuel asks after in an 1863 letter to my step-great-grandmother reveals something about Chicago society of the time as well as the ongoing war.

"Anna L. Smith: Chicago Suffragette," by Craig L. Pfannkuche with Nancy Merriman. Anna (1872?-1949) worked her way up in the feminist movement and the Democratic Party and by the 1930s had switched to Republicanism. "Anna's contributions to political freedom of action for women in Chicago have been overlooked by historians of women's progressivism in Chicago."

Ohio Records and Pioneer Families

The fourth in the Ohio Genealogy Society's quartet of publications is on a catch-up schedule, but it's still packed. Contents of issue #1:

"The Shellhorns of Portage and Summit Counties, Ohio," by Ted Marshall Minier, an interesting presentation of indirect evidence on the identity of John Shellhorn, aiming to amplify the 1972 Shelhorn Genealogy by Lines and Jones.

"A Letter to My Brother: Louis Breuninger," contributed by Karen Miller Bennett

"Letters Written by John Marsh D'Camp, 1825-1837," contributed by Nina B. Mack

"Records of the George Ruckel Family Bible," contributed by Robert L. Keener

"First Families of Ohio: The Early Years," abstracted by Kay Ballantyne Hudson

"Revolutionary War Pension Application Abstracts," by Lois Wheeler

"The Mystery of Captain Benjamin LeRoy, War of 1812," contributed by Eric E. Johnson

"Official Register of Physicians by County, 1896, Washington County"

"Log Cabin Reminiscences -- Daniel Skinner Family," contributed by Sunda Anderosn Peters

"Residents of Mahoning County, Ohio, Infirmary, 1870," abstracted by Joseclyn Wilms, from the US census

"Merchants, Manufacturers & Traders of Ohio, 1885," abstracted from R. G. Dun's The Mercantile Agency Reference Book -- part of a series, in alphabetical order by towns

Ohio Civil War Genealogy Journal #4

The last OCWGJ of 2008 is, as usual, packed -- but to me the big news was underplayed. Two new indexes of northwest Ohio Civil War newspaper letters and articles are now available on line!

From Bowling Green University's Center for Archival Collections (which has other Civil War stuff too), there's a "Civil War Newspaper Correspondence Index," listing letters from soldiers published in newspapers in the counties of Allen, Crawford, Darke, Defiance, Hancock, Henry, Huron, Lorain, Lucas, Ottawa, Paulding, Putnam, Sandusky, Seneca, Williams, Wood, and Wyandot. The index includes names of the letter-writers, but it's organized by military unit. Not all newspapers indexed are available at BGSU.

From the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center (which also has more CW material), there's an "Index to Civil War Letters and Related Articles Published in Northwest Ohio Newspapers, 1861-1865." Three newspapers are indexed -- the Fremont Journal (Sandusky County), Norwalk Reflector (Huron County), and the Sandusky Register (Erie County). All are at RBHPC. I think there's some overlap, but in general it appears that the Hayes index goes deeper into a smaller number of newspapers.

And if you've had enough of indexes for a while, the articles this quarter include many actual letters:

"Letters from the Homefront to a Soldier: The Letters of George W. Tope," by Linda Lee Tope Trent. (There's material here even if you're no Civil War buff: when George says he bought his wife a dress, he means that he bought her the proper amount of cloth with which she made the dress.)

"Henry H. Melick, 32nd OVI: The Pensioner's Tale," by Mari M. McLean.

"Letters from Cap. A. N. Goldwood, 64th OVI & 31st USCI," by Gerald Boone.

"Ask the Experts" includes a lengthy and necessarily-but-unfortunately-inconclusive discussion of the fate of Thomas Hemings, 175th OVI.

"Amanda Township, Fairfield County OH: Volunteers of 1863," by Thomas Stephen Neel.

"1883 Census of Pensioners, Stark County, Ohio," by Michael Elliott.

Illinois' winter quarterly with German pioneers

The centerpiece of the Winter 2007 isue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly is part 2 of Gary Beaumont's "German Immigrant Farmers in Illinois," featuring letters from Jacob Menke, who settled near Beardstown (Cass County) in the 1830s, and a diary by Johann Konrad Dahler, who settled near Mount Carroll (Carroll County) in the 1850s.

"Around us there are about 20 German farmers," wrote Menke, "including three medical practitioners with a degree, jurists, theologists, mechanics, even a mayor of Giesen, foresters etc. -- very educated people with whom we have a very pleasant contact.... We are likely to establish a reading or literary circle and a club..."

Dahler on the winter of 1856-57: "From beginning to end there was deep snow, on which smooth ice three inches thick had formed. When we needed firewood and went with the oxen to drag it in, they would go perhaps three paces on the ice and then break through.... We lost our 2 cows, which had cost 30 dollars apiece. We had a log stable for them and slough hay for feed but we lacked straw for bedding in the extreme cold."

Other articles:

"Illinois Resources: Where From to Kansas? Illinois!" by Cherie Weible

"Alderman Protects Family Graveyard," by Jeanie Lowe

"The Digital Revolution in Genealogical Research: What's Coming from Family Search, Part 1," by Susan A. Anderson

"Six Degrees of Separation or Two: Applications for 'Cluster Genealogy' and 'Genealogy Buddies,''' by Margaret M . Kapustiak

"Are You Killing the Things You Love?" by Patricia L. Miller

"Ask the Retoucher!" by Eric Curtis M. Basir

"Richard F. Sutton's Story: A Revolutionary War Soldier, Part 1," by Raleigh Sutton