Autumn 2014 presentations! Bloomington, Kalamazoo, Terre Haute, Indianapolis

All four of my presentations this fall are in the Eastern time zone, even though I myself am in Central. Check your calendar and join in the fun if you get the chance!


Wednesday 15 October, 3 pm -- "Why We Don't Write and How We Can," Monroe County Public Library, 303 E. Kirkwood, Bloomington, Indiana (advance registration required before 5 pm 8 October: http://mcpl.info/calendar/2014-10). Plus a second hour of discussion and examples.

Short version: If we don't write, we won't need to wonder what will happen to our genealogy stuff when we're gone. New.


Monday 20 October, 7 pm -- "Probate Will Not Be the Death of You," Kalamazoo Valley Genealogical Society, Portage District Library, 300 Library Lane, Portage, Michigan. (I spoke on property records here last spring: these people ask good questions!)

Short version: Everybody dies. Most have probates. Few make wills. Good genealogists will not stop with wills. Previously given at 2013 Indiana Genealogical Society conference in Bloomington.


Monday 10 November, 6:30 pm -- "A Case Study: Are We There Yet?" Wabash Valley Genealogical Society, Vigo County Public Library, One Library Square, Terre Haute, Indiana.

Short version: Follow the Chilcote trail from the 1900 Chicago census to an unmarked Ohio grave – and decide when there’s enough evidence to prove that George and Edward are two men or one man with two names. Previously given at 2013 National Genealogical Society conference in Las Vegas.


Saturday 22 November, 10 am -- "How Hoosiers Got Hitched," Indiana Historical Society, Eugene and Marian Glick Indiana History Center, 315 West Ohio, Indianapolis, Indiana (registration and entry fee: http://www.indianahistory.org/events/how-hoosiers-got-hitched).

Short version: Indiana marriage records have changed over the years. Between 1880 and 1930 in some counties more than one record was created for each marriage – some with different information than the others. A new naming system can help us tell them apart. New, based on the article of the same title that appeared in the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections.





Harold Henderson, "Autumn 2014 presentations! Bloomington, Kalamazoo, Terre Haute, Indianapolis," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Understanding and classifying Indiana marriage records

Have you squeezed out all possible information about your ancestors' Indiana marriages? Probably not if you haven't checked for sources beyond the license and return.

Beginning in the early 1880s, Indiana marriage records provided increasing amounts of information. They also caused increasing confusion, because both the information and the forms it was recorded on changed and were inconsistently named. At times different records were called by the same name, and the same records were called by different names.

Records were created under the auspices of the state Board of Health decades before the informative marriage applications were made mandatory in 1905. Some counties cooperated in creating these earlier records; some have preserved them; some continued to use them even after 1905, giving lucky genealogists a chance to glean additional information by comparing the records. The story is spelled out in my new article in the Indiana Historical Society's twice-yearly The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections.

If you have Indiana people, you need this magazine.



Harold Henderson, "How Hoosiers Got Hitched," The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections vol. 53, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2013), 13-24.



Harold Henderson, "Understanding and classifying Indiana marriage records," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 April 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Personal Papers -- or Public?

Yesterday I was frolicking through the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's complete collection of the maniacally detailed WPA inventories of county records as of 75 years ago. (Use the main catalog and search on call number 977.2 H62IC; the 92 counties are numbered in alphabetical order from Adams to Whitley.) I noticed that in many counties the chief health officer maintained his office in his private office. And frequently, some marriage records were in his custody as well.

A lot of Indiana Justice of the Peace official record books disappeared because they were considered the justice's personal property rather than a public record. As I understand it, Indiana marriage records were the clerk's job until the 1880s when the state and local boards of health were established and took an interest in having more information recorded more systematically; thus no longer were all records in one place.

Is it possible that some of these marriage records became lost as health officers left office or died? Inquiring microhistorians want to know.


Harold Henderson, "Personal Papers -- or Public?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Marriage Records and Indexes: Choose the Original

The other day I was asked, "Is it worth getting the marriage license? They say so little, doesn't the index capture all the information?"

Short answers: Yes, and Not usually.

Longer answer: BCG Standard No. 21 reminds us that "the original is the most authoritative source." Are these sketchy old-school records an exception? No. Six reasons from a mainly  Midwestern viewpoint:

(1) Indexers are human. They can leave something out or transcribe something wrong. This is not a rare occurrence. In this 2008 article I compared marriage indexes to each other and the original records they referred to.

(2) The licenses and returns that I've dealt with name the person who married the couple; many indexes do not. That person's identity, denomination (if any), and location may provide clues as to where the couple lived or where they created other records.

(3) They also give the dates of both events if different.

(4) Some licenses and returns give the bride's or groom's ages, or their places of residence, or both. Some also name witnesses.

(5) Sometimes the bride's or groom's ages are implied by a parent or guardian's note giving consent to the marriage. My all-time favorite in this category comes from La Salle County, Illinois (see illustration). Elizabeth Shown Mills has called such records "land mines." This one sure was.

(6) Sometimes auxiliary records such as marriage applications appear in the guise of regular marriage records; if you don't ask, you  may not receive. In Indiana, many researchers know to look for marriage applications beginning in 1905, and better ones 1940-1977. Not so many know that there are two earlier forms with extensive additional information available for some counties as early as 1882.

Choose the original. You won't regret it.

La Salle County, Illinois, marriage record no. 2093, Dickinson-Berry, 1873; microfilm, La Salle County (Illinois) Genealogy Guild, Ottawa.

Board for the Certification of Genealogists, The BCG Genealogical Standards Manual (Washington DC: BCG, 2000), 8-9.

Harold Henderson, "An Index Is a Treasure Map -- Do You Dig?," Indiana Genealogist, vol.19, no. 3 (September 2008):147-150.

Elizabeth Shown Mills, Evidence Explained (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 2007), 16.


Harold Henderson, "Marriage Records and Indexes: Choose the Original," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.


 

Methodology Monday: finding out the law

Genealogists often need to know the law in ways that relatively few lawyers do. Often a relevant question is more specific in time and circumstance -- not so much at what age you could get married legally, but at what age could you get married in 1894, but only with parental consent?

When I needed to know that for Indiana, I turned to Google Books and triangulated. I found the complete revised statutes of the state for 1881 and again for 1901. In both cases women under 18 and men under 21 had to have parental consent. (I'm reasonably sure -- but not positive! -- that the legislature didn't change the law in the intervening 20 years and then change it back. This is a chronic legal research problem for me, since I'm rarely in a place where I have the time and disposition to check each year's record of legislative enactments.)

Since I was dealing with a possible shotgun marriage, it was also interesting to learn that if a couple married prior to the birth of a child, that would block any charge of bastardy. That was based on a couple of case citations, which did not include years. More research for another day, if needed...

But what I started out to say was, wouldn't it be nice to have a source-cited table of marriageableness for every state, every year?

Milwaukee Marriages 1822-1876 on line

Research Buzz alerts us to a new on-line resource from the Milwaukee Public Library Digital Collections, already well worth a visit: the Milwaukee County Marriage Certificate collection. Here's part of the admirably clear and thorough description:

In the 1960s a box of marriage certificates created between 1822 and 1876 was found at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. The box also included some miscellaneous documents pertaining to the marriage such as permission to marry slips, authorizations, and land deeds. The information in these documents include a parent giving permission for an underage child to marry, an affidavit of there being no impediment to marriage, information on the closeness of the blood relationship, and written permission for the clerk to hand the marriage license to a third party for delivery. These documents generally do not have standardized information, but can be quite interesting. Many of these documents were not in very good condition. Research by the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society (MCGS) indicates that most of these certificates are not recorded at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Some of the records appear in the Wisconsin Pre-1907 Marriage Index and some do not.

The certificates and accompanying documents were filmed in 1966. The Milwaukee Public Library owns a set of these microfilmed marriage certificates. In 1999 the MCGS arranged to have the records refilmed, adding location citations. In 2000 MCGS volunteers created alphabetical indexes for bride and for groom. Roger Cobb with Lois Molitor acted as project coordinators. Over 42,000 names were put into the database that produced the indexes. Unfortunately, the original copies that were filmed in 1966 have vanished. . . .

Most of these documents were created in Milwaukee, but there are a few from other locations. The number of certificates created outside of Milwaukee County is minimal.

In short, if you have Milwaukee people, visit this site yesterday!

Methodology Monday with multiple records

Midwestern newspapers in the 1850s were a sorry lot, genealogically speaking: weekly, four pages, half ads (few of which changed from week to week), the other half mostly boilerplate copied from other newspapers or the federal government. Local news was mainly court-required publications of notice of pending cases.

Thus the Niles (Michigan) Enquirer for November and December 1856, which I had occasion to read last week. In its last eight issues of that year, it took note of a grand total of six marriages. One involved a former resident who got married in Tennessee; another involved a couple from Racine, Wisconsin. The other four marriages were local:

16 November, R. J. H. Beall and Eleanor A. Weever (27 November issue, p. 3 col. 2)
23 November, Alfred L. Wood and Rhoda J. Fowler (27 November issue, p. 3 col. 2)
7 December, E. R. Griswold and C. Chapman (18 December issue, p. 3 col. 1)
16 December, Francis J. Hadlock and Mary Snorf (18 December issue, p. 3 col. 1)

Of course, the marriage I was actually looking for wasn't there, even though I had obtained the original record of it from the holdings of the Berrien County Historical Association a while back. How about these folks?

To my amazement, not one of these four marriages is in the BCHA collection, and only one of them (Beall-Weaver) is in the Family History Library's microfilm of the records of the County Clerk. Unless they appear in ministerial or church records, this scrap of ancient newspaper looks to be the only record of these marriages. I never would have found them at all without some sleuthing help from Sharon Carlson, director of the Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History collection in Kalamazoo. She found two years of the Enquirer, unlabeled, at the back of a microfilm there.

Don't imagine, as I did, that those newspaper marriage notes are merely a subset of the official marriage records that might contain an extra tidbit of information. They may just be your last best hope.

Methodology Monday in La Salle County, Illinois

Last week I spent a profitable hour at the La Salle County Genealogy Guild (you'll see their sign on southbound Illinois Route 23 in downtown Ottawa), where Jim Collins kept me hopping between all the newspaper indexes and probates and county histories and cemetery readings collected in their building. We were disappointed that the relevant 1873 marriage license (on microfilm) was too old to be likely to contain any juicy information like parents' names.

But we looked at it anyway -- and a good thing, too. In addition to the preprinted forms was a handwritten note, where the bride's father gave consent to "the marriage of my adopted daughter."

There's nothing sophisticated or earthshaking about the idea of looking at original records. (Hey, it's the middle of August! You want sophisticated, you have to wait until the Midwestern average temperature gets below 70!) This is just a reminder that the reason for looking is not because it's a Rule, but because you really don't know how that record might change what seemed like a genealogically unproblematic situation.

"Change," of course, is a euphemism. Elizabeth Shown Mills puts the point more sharply in Evidence Explained {16}: "Any relevant record that goes unexamined is a land mine waiting to explode our premature theories."

Methodology Monday with a hungry bulldog

Sometimes you don't need abstruse methodology so much as an attitude. If you can vividly imagine yourself as a hungry bulldog and the evidence you seek as a steamy bowl of dog food, you're just less likely to quit on it!

Recently I had a state marriage return which appeared to have been signed by the county clerk -- as in, the man's signature with "county clerk" printed underneath that line in small type. It was easy to jump to the conclusion that it had been a civil ceremony.

Eventually I came across a county return form for the same event, which made it quite clear that the person signing the first return was in fact the minister who had performed the ceremony! Now I'm off to investigate his denomination -- not that the happy (?) couple stuck around, but just to know which species of minister they went to in their hour of need. But I should have been bulldogging more records of that marriage in the first place.

Just to switch metaphors -- as ESM would say, what a land mine I had left lying there in the meantime!

Secrets of eastern Indiana

Don't overlook college campuses in your tour d'horizon of local resources. I'm not thinking of just the archives and special collections for the moment (although I did blog one set here), but the humble catalog itself. For instance, Ball State University in Muncie has possessed itself of several series of microfilmed records from Delaware County, Indiana: marriage, property, probate, and circuit court order books. And that library is usually open until 3 am, which is more than you can say for the off-campus variety! These goodies are collectively numbered 2303 in Bracken Library's microfilm numbering system.

33,000 Marriages in Lake County, Indiana

That's the gift to researchers from the Northwest Indiana Genealogical Society. The index is unusually comprehensive, including the name of the marrying official (and religious denomination when available), and of course a link to order the original document to be sure everything is well transcribed. Indexing, a major volunteer project coordinated by Marlene Polster, is ongoing, as they are up to book 23 (which includes marriages from 1914) but aiming for 1920 (books 40-41). Hat tip to the Indiana Genealogical Society blog, which keeps up with lots of local events and queries that I don't, so you should go there!