Now up to eleven mostly Midwestern indexes and finding aids

In addition to the nine links posted last year, two additional research aids are available on my web site:

Wisconsin Small City Directories 1903-1936 -- four rolls of microfilm published by City Directories of the United States, containing 29 directories for various years for more than 24 different towns and 7 different counties -- but labeled neither on the boxes nor at the beginning of the films themselves!

In order to make this resource useable I have spooled through the four films and listed title and publisher (when available) and date, and posted the lists and indexed them. This Wisconsin listing joins similar listings for Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. I have included CDUS's numbers as well as the numbers assigned to them at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, where I consulted them.

Few of these towns were able to support annual or even biennial directories, but it's a good bet that diligent researchers who visit local libraries and archives will find directories for more years than were microfilmed here. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries each of these towns had their own confident local business community.

Indiana private laws relating to La Porte County 1843-1847 and 1850, abstracted from Google Books. This is an experiment in making this relatively obscure resource more available. These are drawn from "session law" books describing the laws passed relating to particular people and organizations in each legislative session. Are your people mentioned?



Harold Henderson, "Now up to eleven mostly Midwestern indexes and finding aids," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 April 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Genealogy in Other Parts of the Library

Genealogists who visit the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center from out of town, such as me, may make the mistake of thinking that the genealogy part is the whole library. Even those of us who notice the other departments may miss the fact that they contain useful genealogical material too. Here are three from my experience:

Microfilmed editions of the Methodist publication Western Christian Advocate (published 1834-1929) are held in the reference division of Readers' Service Reference (on the first floor).

Physical copies of early local laws passed by the Indiana General Assembly (1828-1835, 1839, 1844-1852) are in the Indiana Documents part of Business and Technology Reference, at the opposite end of the second floor from genealogy. They are not uniformly catalogued in the library catalog, however.

The monumental compilation of summary figures of the agriculture schedule of the 1860 US census, J. C. G. Kennedy's Agriculture of the United States in 1860, 317.3 F51GA, is also in the business department. It's a good tool for comparing ancestors and others at that time. (It's also available on Google Books if that format is manageable for you.)



Harold Henderson, "Genealogy in Other Parts of the Library," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Local Laws in Indiana on line, a sampling

We think of laws as general and impersonal, but legislatures also pass "private" or "local" laws directed to individuals or localities -- sometimes fairly routine, sometimes to redress injustices. These private laws were more common in earlier days and in Indiana are preserved in books published for each session of the General Assembly. Some are on line, some not -- but in either case the titling and cataloging are irregular. Many libraries catalog them as serials. Since the legislature began meeting in December and carried over into the next year, dating can be an issue. GoogleBooks makes its online copies rather hard to find. I have located six years there, 1843-1847 and 1850.

La Porte County, Indiana, is mentioned 30 times in these six books, an average of five items per year. They included:

* a few divorces,

* a few cases of aliens who owned and sold land,

* several incorporations of local institutions and businesses, usually naming the directors,

* some road authorizations with names of commissioners and directions (“on as straight a line as the nature of the ground will admit of”), and

* some routine, or just plain weird. I'm still scratching my head over the county commissioners' being authorized "to make John Johnson, of said county, the same allowance for the arrest of a horse thief, calling himself John Johnson, as they might have made if said horse thief had been convicted of said crime.”

Full details and access instructions if you get stuck are over at Midwest Roots.

In addition to looking for particular people, these books can be used as a kind of on-the-scene history, a bit like the "annuals" that encyclopedias used to publish. Names of businesses and institutions changed over time, and often the hardest part of researching people connected with them is figuring out what they were called at the time. So it may be helpful to know that in 1846 the legislature amended the charter of La Porte University so that its medical school would be known as Indiana Medical College. Those institutions are long gone but they were significant in early Midwest medical education.

Local histories tend to focus on those enterprises and individuals that succeeded and stuck around; the lawmakers didn't know the future, so this is a place to look for a "clay turnpike company," plank roads, and off-brand railroads that may have never run a train. History is often written by the winners; genealogy is written by everybody.


ADDED TUESDAY MORNING 31 July:
Two useful sets of information from this source in Indiana have been extracted, indexed, and published:

Malinda E. E. Newhard, Name Changes Granted by the Indiana General Assembly Prior to 1852 (Harlan, IN: author, 1981)

Malinda E. E. Newhard, Divorces Granted by the Indiana General Assembly Prior to 1852 (Harlan, IN: author, 1981). Note that in some cases the General Assembly actually granted the divorce, and in others it authorized the filing of a court case locally.

Newhard cited General Laws 1817-1851, Local Laws 1835-1851, and Special Laws 1818, 1824, and 1831.

Plank road scrip illustration from Sellitstore (http://sellitstore.ecrater.com/p/9628689/michigan-city-union-plank-road# : accessed 28 July 2012), where the bill once said to be worth $5 was for sale for $125.

Harold Henderson, "Local Laws in Indiana on line, a sampling," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Get Out of That Rut!

 Archives.com has just posted my article, "Ten Little Known Indiana Records," but the truth is that these sources are little-known, and underused, everywhere! My examples come from the Hoosier State but most of these records exist elsewhere. If I were rewriting that article today I would probably shoehorn in a mention of "local laws" from the 19th century as another example.

Genealogy learning is a constant alternation between learning about new (to us) sources, and learning new ways to use them (methodology). We need to keep doing both in order to keep growing.








 Harold Henderson, "Little Known Indiana Records," Archives.com (http://www.archives.com/experts/henderson-harold/indiana-records.html : accessed 26 July 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Get Out of That Rut!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]