Methodology Monday with the genealogy of mislabeled records

Somehow, somewhere in the depths of the 19th Century U.S. Department of War, a unit of Revolutionary War soldiers got moved from Virginia to Connecticut. Probably it happened when the Compiled Military Service Record cards for George Markham's Revolutionary War company were created from a single 1781 original muster roll. It took a massive systematic effort by Craig Roberts Scott, in the current (September) National Genealogical Society Quarterly, to prove that they should be moved back.

The muster roll itself had "Virginia" written on its side, and no original source places them in New England. Scott first found that Markham himself was closely tied to Chesterfield County, Virginia, both before and after 1781. Then he correlated dozens of the individual officers and soldiers in the unit to same-name men on record in that county. One at a time.

A groundbreaking (or rather, ground-restoring) project of this kind doesn't have to be fancy, but it does have to be thorough and systematic. This one also reminds us to pay close attention when a derivative record makes a claim that cannot be confirmed in the original. That's like a sign saying, "DIG HERE."


Craig Roberts Scott, "Captain George Markham's Military Company: Virginia not Connecticut," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (September 2014): 201-30.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday with the genealogy of mislabeled records," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 December 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

More Midwestern Military Indexes On Line

For those of you not yet familiar with Joe Beine's online guides to on-line indexes, and his related Genealogy Roots Blog, consider this your wake-up call. For everyone else, here are the Midwestern military records among a goodly number he's just enlisted:

INDIANA

SAR patriot graves registry
Mexican War veterans
Civil War muster rolls index
South Bend Tribune service notes (WW2)

MICHIGAN

Military personnel who died in the Vietnam War



Harold Henderson, "More Midwestern Military Indexes On Line," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Words from IGS Conference Day

Several admonitions are echoing in my mind from the Indiana Genealogical Society's day-long conference in Fort Wayne; other attendees' mileage may vary.

More than half of the 111 attendees also attended the business meeting, where we heard that our 76 volunteers had helped index 100% of Indiana's portion of the 1940 census in less than a month, far ahead of all neighboring states.

* Speaker Michael Hall, deputy chief genealogical officer of FamilySearch: “Every one of you should be writing in the FamilySearch Wiki [page about your county] about your libraries and resources,” thus helping draw genealogical tourism.

* Speaker Debra Mieszala, who works in the genealogical part of the process of identifying and returning remains of US soldiers long lost in action: The military now uses all three kinds of DNA -- Y-DNA, mitochondrial DNA, and autosomal DNA, so relatives of missing soldiers may have new opportunities to provide reference samples. Of the 88,000 missing, 78,000 are from WWII.

* IGS president Michael Maben, who asked for volunteers for an advocacy committee and identified the State Archives (long relegated to an outdated warehouse) as a problem to be addressed: “We need to press our legislature to replace that facility."

* Mieszala again (part of an informative talk on finding the patent filings of inventive ancestors): The Great Lakes Regional Branch of NARA has a Facebook page, and we should "friend" it. Among the many great examples they post from their holdings, one is a patent infringement case.

Lots of good people and good laughs, all in a day's genealogy work . . . the April 2013 conference in Bloomington will feature Josh Taylor.


Harold Henderson, “Words from IGS Conference Day,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 April 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

Western Reserve Historical Society Library

It looks like my career of driving through Cleveland without stopping may soon come to an end. Reviewing Ann Sindelar's article on the Western Reserve Historical Society for last week's post on Ohio Genealogy News led me to just books, periodicals, and manuscripts galore, but also online databases. For instance:

an index to Cleveland's 1907 voter registration records, from a time when registration was required by law. Note that the online index serves as a pointer to additional information at WRHS that is not indexed, such as the registrant's age, length of residence, and signature.

an index to marriage and death notices in the Jewish Independent and Jewish Review and Observer 1889-1964.

an index to nine volumes of Bible records copied in nine volumes at WRHS.

an index to northeast Ohio servicemen's photographs (and sometimes articles) from the Plain Dealer, 1940-1955.

There's much more, including a listing of WRHS's holdings of obsolete Ohio paper money, including "demand notes, scrip, post notes, certificates of deposit, counterfeits, capital stock and fractional currency from over 100 Ohio cities." This is statewide: I found items described from Granville, Marietta, and Kenton. (The originals are in the Vault.)

If you start digging for the really good stuff in their manuscript lists, be aware of peculiarities in the search functions. For instance, title searches are for the first word in the title; names that appear later on are not indexed. Bulldog searching will be called for.