Where I'll be speaking this spring

My spring talks are all in Ohio! There's plenty of time yet to register for these conferences, but beware: do not under any circumstances confuse April with May, or confuse the city beginning with "C" in the upper-right-hand corner of the state with the one in the lower-left-hand corner.

Friday, April 13, 1 pm, at the Ohio Genealogical Society meeting in Cleveland, on "The Other Midwestern Archives." Some less well-known places to research once you've exhausted the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, the Newberry Library, and the Wisconsin State Historical Society, or they've exhausted you.

Friday, May 11, 9:30 am, at the National Genealogical Society meeting in Cincinnati, on the records of the Indianapolis Orphan Asylum (1851-1941) held at the Indiana Historical Society. If you're missing a Hoosier in this time period who might have been orphaned, or just had a family living on the edge, these records may be just what you're looking for. And the stories alone would break a stone's heart.

Saturday, May 12, 9:30 am, NGS again, on "Indirect Evidence: What To Do When You Don't Have Perry Mason on Your Side." Nine relatively simple cases show what indirect evidence can do for us if we look for it with the right attitude. If you are hungering for complex cases, take that hour off and read the latest NGSQ instead ;-)

Compared to Rootstech, I would say that these two conferences overall offer more meat for intermediate and advanced genealogists (and better quality control), and less for developers and advanced techies. YMMV.

When the dead gain power

Recently I heard from genealogist/researcher Barry Fleig, who I hadn't talked to in 22 years. Back then he was an indispensable source when I wrote an article about the unanticipated exhumation of people buried in anonymous graves on the former grounds of a Chicago mental health facility in the Dunning neighborhood. (It was a genealogy article, but I was comprehensively ignorant of the subject then.) He had just seen report of a similar situation developing in Lexington, Kentucky, at the Eastern States Hospital. More on that story here. More on the general topic in several February posts at Graveyards of Illinois.

In both cases it's in the interest of powerful individuals, businesses, and bureaucracies to deny the existence of these poorly documented graveyards and the people in them, and to withhold any records that survive. (Some preposterous provisions of HIPAA and even more preposterous misunderstandings of it now make the situation even worse.)

But the people buried in these forgotten places -- usually unsuccessful, unappealing, and unlucky in life -- have a surprising power in death. Living people (the majority without a vested interest) might well have scorned them in life -- but we do not want their remains randomly dug up and tossed about.

One obvious thing that Barry and I both missed at the time is that pretty much every site of an old asylum or mental hospital is also going to be the site of extensive and poorly documented burials from the 1800s and at least the first half of the 1900s.

Bookends Friday: Second Home

What institutions affected poor children the most in the 1800s and early 1900s? Churches? Check. Public schools? Check. And number three? According to Timothy Hacsi, it was orphanages, then better known as "orphan asylums." {1}

As it turns out, in his fascinating book Second Home: Orphan Asylums and Poor Families in America, we learn that your ancestors don't need to have been orphaned to have spent time in such places. They served to help poor families hold themselves together and reunite by offering what was in effect temporary child care for a few weeks, months, or years: "By the 1870s and 1880s...the vast majority of asylum children had at least one living parent, and many had two living parents." {94} (Note: this book isn't easy to find, so enjoy the GoogleBooks partial preview. There's also an insightful review in the October 1999 issue of the American Historical Review if you can gain access to the right sort of library.)

Unlike other institutions created early in the 1800s (prisons, insane asylums, reformatories), orphan asylums didn't usually aim to "fix" their clients, only to help them. If anything those who ran the orphanages, after close acquaintance and frequent interaction with poor parents and their children, came to reject the widespread American notion that anyone who is poor must be lazy, drunk, or otherwise deficient in character. With some exceptions (like Michigan's state school), they did not undertake the utopian project of removing poor children permanently from their families in order to "save" them. Because their goals were usually more humble, they succeeded where their more ambitious institutional cousins failed.