Pretty good news for Kane County Illinois land researchers

Quietly, the Kane County, Illinois, Recorder's office has placed all of its deeds (and several other kinds of documents) on line. Basically this is good news but there are a few qualifiers as described in the following quickie tutorial:

(1) Few genealogists will be using the tab that says "Search Land Records" --the straightforward grantee and grantor search only works for deeds since 1980. The interface for older deeds is somewhat klunky, but structurally it's the same that we go through in person: first find promising entries in the grantee and grantor indexes, then find the deeds themselves in the deed books.

(2) The grantee and grantor indexes are reached by going to the tab "View Miscellaneous Documents," then "All Miscellaneous Documents," and then choosing "Grantee Index" (actually a whole bunch of volumes of grantee indexes) or "Grantor Index" from the resulting menu. Under "Grantee Index" there's a list of books identified by volume number and year. Pick your book and then pay attention to the, um, unique patented method that a previous recorder chose to use for indexing. (It's called "Dennick's Universal Chart System of Indexing, patented in 1893, and explained below ** as it will take a while.)

(3) Once you've found a book and page number to consult in the deed books themselves, go back to the beginning and hit the tab "Books," under that "Document Books," under that "Folders" (actually original deed books), pick the desired volume number, and then within that volume the page.

(4) Once you're there, the images are variable in quality, with many portions of pages overexposed. (In some cases you may want to transcribe from the image rather than print it out.) Many pages are missing at least one line at the bottom. I have usually found FamilySearch's deed images from other states to be of better quality.

All this said, this degree of online access is better to have than not to have. Kane County is a suburban county west of Chicago, and I'm in a suburban county southeast of Chicago. Even living that close it's cheaper to work the deeds this way than in person. And the more people who can use this option, the better the old deeds are saved from extra handling.

** The grantee and grantor indexes are each arranged under one of many supposed 19th-century improvements on the alphabetical-by-first-letter-of-surname-and-then-chronological default system. First, surnames are organized in the following 47 initial-letter-equivalent groups, each beginning with a certain number, as follows:

A 1, Ba 14, Be 27, Br 40, B 53, Ca 66, Co 79, C 92, D 105, E 118, F 131, Gr 144, G 157, Ha 170, Ho 183, H 196, I 209, J 210, K 223, L 236, Ma 249, Mo 262, M 275, Mc 288, N 301, O 314, P 327, Q 340, Ro 341, R 354, Sc 367, Sh 380, Sm 393, St 406, S 419, T 432, U 445, Va 446, Ve 447, V 448, Wa 449, Wh 462, Wi 475, W 488, Young 501, Y 502, Z 503.


Within each surname initial-letter-equivalent, given names are organized according to 13 different initial letter equivalent groups: AB, C, DE, FG, HI, Ja, Jo, J, KL, MN, OPQR, STUV, and WXYZ.

Note that in this system surnames are not in alphabetical order: Grommet will appear ahead of Garofalo because their initial-letter-equivalent groups are in that order. And within each surname letter-equivalent-group, the names are organized by given names.

I looked for Levi Goodrich in the earliest grantee index, beginning in 1837.  Since his surname starts with G (page 157), given names beginning with "L" will be found at the ninth given-name initial letter equivalent group, so 165. (One big advantage of Kane County's system is that its image numbers correspond to the original page numbers, at least where I looked.) On 165 I found an L. D. Goodrich buying property, referring to a deed at volume 35, page 511. Before going to the deed, I carefully scrolled to the bottom of the page and found that this listing was continued on page 130, where I checked for any more.

OK, he turned out to be Lewis D. Goodrich, not Levi, but those are the breaks. Good luck and good hunting!

Note: As I have learned from Michael Hait's on-line state resources book, DeKalb County has what appears to be a similar setup (in beta test and requiring login) which I have not examined in detail.


Harold Henderson, "Pretty good news for Kane County, Illinois, land researchers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0

There's an old saying, "When you're tired of London, you're tired of life." Well, when you get tired of browsing this book, you're tired of genealogy.

Earlier this month my friend and colleague Michael Hait released the third edition of his On Line State Resources for Genealogy. It's up to 1140 pages and more than 9000 resources -- hosted at a bewildering variety of web sites, with a much deeper and different reach than the popular free and subscription mega-sites.

Contrary to the title, the book includes on-line resources at the national level including the National Archives. Some sites require sign-in. "Resources" include images of original records; derivative records (such as transcriptions and abstracts); authored works; and finding aids and indexes. As stated in the introductory material, use the finding aids and indexes and derivative sources to lead to the original records when possible.

The table of contents is arranged by state and then by repository in apparently random order within each state. A click on any entry in the table of contents takes you directly to the repository's listings, and a click on the specific repository's link takes you there.

Midwestern researchers will be interested to know that Indiana listings occupy 92 pages, Illinois 61, Ohio 46, and Michigan and Wisconsin each 14.

This undertaking is nothing less than gargantuan. And it includes resources I did not know about but should have. Still it doesn't have everything: absent are La Crosse, Wisconsin, city directories; the Monroe County, Wisconsin, Local History Room; and several name indexes available at the Chicago branch of NARA.

But as the numbers mount up this enterprise faces a deeper problem -- how to organize the resources. Not only are they proliferating daily (the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center just announced eleven new ones). Often the originating agency may be different, or in a different place, than the record itself (such as county records created and listed under the name of a state agency). Equally bothersome, it is also often difficult to discern where one repository ends and another begins, since the same collection may be reached through more than one portal. It certainly helps that this book is searchable and not in print form, but part of its value is that the resources also be rationally browseable.

This compilation is itself an essential part of a "reasonably exhaustive search" as prescribed by BCG's Genealogy Standards, but other searches need to be made both within and outside of it.

Another form of browsing is to follow the compiler's new blog featuring a resource every few days.






Michael Hait, comp., On Line State Resources for Genealogy, third edition (PDF/ebook, privately printed, 2013).


Harold Henderson, "On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]







Harold Henderson, "On Line State Records for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]