Three Great Online Resources

It's been a busy research week, so let's cut the cackle and mention three great online resources for the Midwest and beyond:

Genealogy Book Links, a guide -- by state, surname, and type of material -- to books freely available on line. Stop here first and you won't have to hit quite as many sites in your quest! Hat tip to Pro Genealogists' blog.

Miriam Midkiff's metadirectory of on line city directories, also free. I've mentioned this before, but considering how often I use it, I should mention it at least twice a week! (That's not all she's doing, either...)

Ancestry.com's US Indexed County Land Ownership Maps, 1860-1918. Sorry, not everything on line is free, and I don't know if this is available on the version of Ancestry available through many public libraries. The index is by surname as written on the plat books, which can be a headache if you want the plat of some little fly-by-night nineteenth-century boom town, but it's still a great idea. I just used it today, and a quick survey of our five Midwestern states shows that something over 2.5 million landowners' names or initials are indexed here, just in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Enjoy!

Got Van Buren County ancestors?

A nice set of 1906 township plat maps for Van Buren County, Michigan, is available on line through Michigan State University. If you're rusty on Michigan geography, Van Buren is the second county up Lake Michigan on the west side of the state, just north of Berrien (St. Joseph) and just west of Kalamazoo. If your research target owned land there, you can find them, but it'll be a quicker process if you know which township.

P.S. OOPS...somewhere along the line I forgot to remember to mention that my first sight of this link was over at In Deeds. Thanks!!

Early 20th Century in Marinette County, Wisconsin

Plat books and yearbooks are the current offerings of the Marinette County Library System and the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections at Marinette Local History. Some text is searchable, but not all. Browsing may be more satisfactory, and it's a long drive from most places to the western shores of Green Bay, so enjoy. MCLS hopes to do more digitizing to preserve the original records.

You'll wish your ancestor stopped in Shawano County Wisconsin

In case you're wondering, this is the county just WNW of Green Bay, on the way to Wausau. Check out the Shawano County resources, including 80,000+ obituaries, and (one of my personal faves) plat maps from 1898, 1905, and 1911.

Online Plat Book Indexes, an idea whose time has come?

If your research targets lived in Monroe County, Wisconsin, the Local History and Genealogy Room allows you to search for them in the county's 1877, 1897, 1915, and 1948 plat books. More counties should get on this bandwagon, reminding on-line folks of the importance of land records (few of which are digitized or indexed on line), and of geography itself as a part of genealogy.

The good folks at Census Finder have state maps with counties and links to online maps of some of them, including plat maps. You can check out your favorite state either by scrolling halfway down the main page and picking a state to see its county map and list -- or by simply typing http://www.censusfinder.com/mapxy.htm into your browser's address bar, substituting the state's two-letter postal abbreviation for "xy."

I found many Midwestern counties with beautiful graphic displays of one or more plat books, but only two others with actual indexes: Eau Claire County, Wisconsin for 1910, and Lee County, Illinois, for (hold your breath) 1863, 1872, 1900, 1921, 1935, and 1941. Lee County may be small but it's mighty in genealogy. My great-grandparents lived there for many years but owned no land.

Ironically, censusfinder.com doesn't have Monroe County's plat book indexes listed yet.

Did Your Ancestor Own Land in Illinois After 1859?

If so , you may be in luck. The Illinois State Library has a fine collection of land ownership maps and atlases, the oldest of which cover Hancock, Stephenson, and Winnebago counties in 1859. These were commercial products and coverage is uneven both as to counties and specific dates.

No, they're not on line; what makes this collection special is that most of it circulates via interlibrary loan. The full checklist of maps is on line (PDF); talk to your local librarian. Just one example: these maps can be used to generate a list of nearby neighbors if you trying to identify a woman's maiden name (even better if you can correlate them with a near-time census listing, not forgetting Illinois' state censuses on the 5's).

(Hat tip to Cyndi's List.)