Surveyors and census takers run amok

(1) Ashtabula County, Ohio, isn't what you think. Yes, its land is divided into mostly rectangular townships, and they in turn are divided up into numbered most rectangular lots. But when the lots were divided by metes and bounds. (That's what you get when you cross the Connecticut Western Reserve with the Northwest Territory.)

But some of those metes and bounds may memorialize some lovely spring day when the surveying crew went fishing instead. After specifically describing three sides of the lot, the fourth side is to begin "so far south as to include fifty-five acres of land."

In other words, nobody knows exactly where that last property line is. Bad surveyor, no biscuit.

(2) We've all followed someone up the census decades, hoping desperately that they will make it to 1880 so as to product at least some sort of record of where their parents were born. Well, don't give up just because their grave marker says they died 3 January 1880 and the census date of record was 1 June 1880. Not only can any record be mistaken, sometimes the mistake is in our favor!

The census taker visited the Boggs household in New Brighton, Pennsylvania, and wrote down all the information for Margaret J. Boggs . . . and later put a line through it because she had died back in January. But the information, including her parent's alleged birth states, remains legible.

When in doubt, always prefer that wacky original to the fair copy.



Ashtabula County, Ohio, Deeds Z:271-2, Hiram & Sophia Boyd to Erastus Porter, 21 October 1839; Recorder, Jefferson.

1880 US Census, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, population schedule, New Brighton, ED 195, p. 291C, dwelling 24, family 28, James Boggs household for Margaret; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : viewed 27 April 2014), citing NARA microfilm publication T9, roll 1097.

s griffith vandusen, Find A Grave memorial 54,029,186 created 23 June 2010 for Margaret J. Boggs 1831-1880, digital image of grave marker (http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Boggs&GSiman=1&GScid=897646&GRid=54029186& : viewed 29 April 2014), citing Grove Cemetery, New Brighton, Beaver County, Pennsylvania. Marker shows age at death 49 y 2 m, implying 3 November 1830 birth, contrary to memorial's statement. 

Harold Henderson, "Surveyors and census takers run amok," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 May 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Subterranean Direct Evidence: A Research Travelogue

In my experience, aspiring genealogists who read the top journals would love to read more than the polished, logical summary. They also want a taste of the research process that made the polished, logical summary possible. Here's one taste, involving my mother-in-law's great-grandfather's sister Elizabeth Bassett, who married Harry Porter. In this case finding Harry's origins was the problem.

I met up with some other folks on line who had also been researching Harry for a while. They had been using original records and had found much about his life in western New York and later western Illinois (Fulton County). Better still, they had some good clues indicating that he might well be the same Harry Porter who had grown up in Jefferson County, New York, with half a dozen brothers and sisters, none of whom had migrated to Illinois with him or had any known contact with him in later life.

Was Harry of Jefferson County the same man as the Harry who married Elizabeth and lived in Illinois? There might be enough indirect evidence to make a case, but there was plenty more research to do. Jefferson County Harry's father, John S. Porter, died in 1840, by which time Elizabeth's Harry had settled in Illinois. Any record that named Jefferson County Harry's residence would pretty well seal the deal one way or another.

Of particular interest, my new-found cohorts had unearthed an on-line newspaper item stating that two of Jefferson County Harry's sisters had received land from their father John S. Porter in a partition suit in the Jefferson County Court of Common Pleas. (Partition is a court case in which heirs ask that the decedent's real estate be divided among them.)

I consulted a researcher in Salt Lake City, who located the only deed Harry ever executed in Jefferson County. Shortly after father John's death, Jefferson County Harry sold all his rights to John's land to his sister Lydia Maine. Unfortunately the deed did not say where Harry was living at the time.

With this background knowledge I went to Jefferson County with two specific research targets:

(1) the loose papers in John S. Porter's probate, which should contain a list of heirs and a receipt from Harry, either of which might say where he was living; and

(2) the partition suit, which might also name Harry in some useful way.

Target #1 didn't work out. John's probate did list Harry as a recipient of a share of the estate, but it did not say where he was living at the time. And I found no receipt from Harry at all, although there should have been one. Probates can be like that sometimes.

That left Target #2. I had hoped to find a row of bound court books from the period, with in-book indexes. No such luck. The individual court sessions were each bound separately with no hard covers and no indexes, and with the three different kinds of courts (General Sessions, Common Pleas, and Oyer and Terminer) mixed together. Worse yet, according to the labels on the archival folders, there were no Common Pleas sessions for 1840 in the box at all!

Never trust a label when you can look. I looked at a file labeled General Sessions. Halfway through the writing was upside down. I flipped the booklet over and saw the "back" page was labeled "Common Pleas." The courts had saved paper by using the same set of pages for both courts' records, but only one was mentioned in the folder label. The needed Common Pleas sessions were there after all, stored archivally and in chronological order.

After that scare, I soon found records of two key court sessions: one where the court received the Porter heirs' petition for a partition of John S. Porter's land and named commissioners to divide it up, and another where the court approved the commissioners' proposal. Sister Lydia was to have two shares, and Harry's name was not mentioned. Having seen the deed, I knew why, but I still didn't know if this was our Harry or not.

While the court session records were being copied, I thought hard and realized I had one last option. I asked if they had any loose papers from Common Pleas, in the hopes (a) that the papers might include the actual petition the heirs had submitted, and (b) that if they did, the petition might contain more detail than the court's ruling had. I was soon rewarded with a box tight-packed with a year's worth of "trifold" papers from various cases, as they had been submitted to the court 172 years ago and then folded for storage. They were called "law papers," so there was no assurance that they would even include petitions.

Like the cases themselves, the trifolds had no index, but at least they were in chronological order. I worked my way through November and into December. (Time was running out in my world too.) But then, there it was: not one but two copies of the petition the heirs had filed with the court. And it named one of the heirs as "Harry Porter of Farmington Fulton County Illinois." O happy day!

One moral of this story: it would have done no good at all for me to go to Jefferson County "looking for Harry Porter." Genealogy at this stage requires knowing much more than the target's name -- the family, the type of record, the approximate date, the name of the court, the process involved in the original court proceeding -- enough that you can get to the unindexed records, keep going, and hopefully do some good with them.


Harold Henderson, "Subterranean Direct Evidence: A Research Travelogue," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Professional Work: 96 Deeds, 204 Years

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the second article in the June NGS Quarterly (free with National Genealogical Society membership) is the longest article the journal has ever published. With 21 maps in 18 pages, it's the most visual genealogy argument I've ever seen in print.

The article is a collaboration between the late Birdie Monk Holsclaw, CG, and her literary executor (and NYGBR editor) Karen Mauer Green, CG. It is a fine memorial in itself and one can only hope that there might be more.

George Hachenberger (d. 1830) of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, married Anna Maria Hollinger, but the name is not distinctive enough in that time and place to identify her parents. Anna Maria was identified by tracing the land her husband was reported to own on neighbors' deeds, which in the process revealed much more genealogical information.

To make the case, 96 deeds involving neighboring properties were winnowed down to ten. Each of those ten purchases is portrayed in an individual map and then fitted in to the neighborhood on a second map. But the most hair-raising phrase in the entire article is the statement that the ten deeds required to make the case were recorded between 1766 and . . . 1980.

One moral of the story (the authors give seven): you can't do brick wall research in Pennsylvania and other state-land states unless you're prepared to plat metes-and-bounds deeds.



Karen Mauer Green and Birdie Monk Holsclaw, "'Beginning at a Black Oak...': Hachenberger Evidence from a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Neighborhood Reconstruction," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 100 (June 2012): 105-22.

Harold Henderson, "Professional Work: 96 Deeds, 204 Years," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Midwestern Deeds Online Update

In the five-state area of our focus, I now know of a total of five counties that have historical deeds on line. (Here's my original post on the subject from June.) These are all free sites. I've improved the linkage, and DeKalb is new!

Illinois

DeKalb County via FamilySearch (browseable with indexes)

Will County via Illinois Digital Archive (indexes only, surnames A-K only)

Ohio

Cuyahoga County via fiscal officer (searchable by book and page numbers only)

Stark County via recorder (sign up, archive search, first search index by letter, then deeds by book and page)

Wisconsin

Outagamie County via FamilySearch (browseable with indexes)


These are strictly deeds, the meat and potatoes of property research -- not patents, maps, plats, or tract books. (As far as I can tell, Ancestry has nothing at all in this category.) Surely there are more!


Harold Henderson, "Midwestern Deeds Online Update," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Top 5 MWM Posts for June 2012

1. Professionals and Amateurs, Together Forever (June 29)

2. Continue Growing (June 1)

3. Are You On Board? (June 7)

4. Midwestern Deeds On Line -- More or Less! (June 5)

5. Don't Assume Probate Courts Only Do Probate! (June 17)

The first three ran well ahead. I'll list the favorites from July in early September once the dust has settled.

Least viewed:

IGHR Samford Day 2 (June 12)


News not blog related: I'll be speaking about lesser-known Midwestern archives a week from now, Saturday morning the 11th, at the South Suburban Genealogical and Historical Society in Hazel Crest, Illinois. Check out their web site in any case -- they have some records you won't find anywhere else!



Harold Henderson, "Top Five MWM Posts for June 2012," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Jenny Lind, Elvis Presley, and the Evolution of Property in the US

UCLA law professor Stuart Banner has written American Property, a lively, smart history of how some things have quit being property (human beings, public office, and commons, for instance) and others have become property over the past 300+ years. New forms of property include fame/privacy (your picture), news, certain pollution rights, the electromagnetic spectrum, and many living things.

I think its main value for genealogists lies in seeing how property changes historically, and not in the way we might think. Non-physical property was well understood long ago; physical items like transplantable organs have only recently become in some cases quasi-property. And the changes are usually driven by technology, wealth, politics, and popularity, not legal theory or idealism. And if you want up-to-date, in the final chapter, Banner debunks the idea that information wants to be free.

So I view this as kind of a back-door history that tells us once again, from another angle, how much the past is another country. "Jenny Lind had toured the country in the 1850s without profiting from the sale of Jenny Lind merchandise, but when Elvis Presley toured the country in the 1950s, he likely earned more from licensing fees than from ticket sales." Lind's agent, P. T. Barnum, was fine with unauthorized Lind merchandise, which was just as well since there was no way for him to stop it. Elvis's agent, on the other hand, took unauthorized Elvis purveyors to court and never lost a case. {155} About the same time (mid-19th century), "goodwill" as a business asset and a form of property also came into its own. {38-39}



Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)


Harold Henderson, "Jenny Lind, Elvis Presley, and the Evolution of Property in the US," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Two Simple Things Deeds Can Do

They can connect a common-name person in one place to another:

In 1840, Harry Porter "of Farmington, Fulton County, Illinois," sold property in Clarkson, Monroe County, New York, where he had lived for almost twenty years before heading west. This contemporary record confirms other records left at much later dates by his descendants.

They can provide evidence of death in times and places where vital records are scarce:

In 1823, Oliver Lee sold part of lot 29 in the Town of Warsaw, Genesee County, New York, to Matthew Hoffman. It was described as "beginning at a stake in the north line of Land owned by Chauncey L. Sheldon..." Nine years later, when Hoffman sold the same land to Isaac C. Bronson, it was described as "beginning at a stake in the north line of land owned by the late Chauncey L. Sheldon deceased..."

In this case, the deeds' information can be confirmed. Dr. Chauncey L. Sheldon has a beautiful and well-preserved 1828 gravestone in the Warsaw Pioneer Cemetery. It's documented and imaged on Find A Grave -- along with other unsourced material that does not appear on the stone. Since 1841 the graveyard has been in Wyoming County, New York, but when Chauncey died it wasn't.

Confirmation doesn't mean the deeds are unnecessary. No important genealogical conclusion should rest on a single piece of information, any more than a chair should have only one leg.

Monroe County, New York, Deeds 52:174, Porter to True, 28 August 1840; County Clerk, Rochester

Genesee County, New York, Deeds 18:501, Lee to Hoffman 24 November 1823, and Hoffman to Bronson 31 October 1832; County Clerk, Batavia.

Harold Henderson, "Two Simple Things Deeds Can Do," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

How Harry Porter's first deed was recorded in a county he had nothing to do with: Beware peripheral vision!

Last week I spent some time focusing on Harry Porter, the husband of my mother-in-law's great-grand aunt Elizabeth Bassett. Back in 2009 he had only been in my genealogical "peripheral vision." In other words, my interest in him had extended only to his relationship to another (non-problematic) relative. He wasn't crucial to that project, but I was just interested enough at the time to jot down the book and page numbers for his property transactions, as recorded in Orleans and Monroe Counties, New York.

Now that I'm focusing on him, I went back and copied and read the deeds themselves. What a revelation! I had always wondered what he'd been doing in Orleans County in 1825 when he never showed up there again.

Well, he was never there. That deed was made in 1819, when Harry bought 1.5 acres in the Town of Murray in Genesee County. Later that year, the Town of Clarkson was split off from the Town of Murray. In 1821, the Town of Clarkson and more was taken from Genesee County and went into the making of Monroe County. In 1824, Orleans County was split off from Genesee County, taking with it the smaller Town of Murray. Harry and his family lived for the next 15-20 years in Clarkson, where he'd made his first land purchase and where all his later land dealings took place as far as I know.

(If you're getting dizzy, take the map cure. For the county part of these boundary changes, check out the maps at the on-line Atlas of Historical County Boundaries from Chicago's Newberry Library.)

In 1854, some diligent person from Orleans County went down to Batavia (the Genesee County seat) and laboriously copied out by hand every pre-1824 deed recorded in the area that later became Orleans County -- or what he thought was the area. The Town of Murray was in Orleans County in 1854, of course, but not the part of it that became Clarkson. So Harry's 1819 deed was erroneously re-recorded in Orleans County after the fact, in Deed Book A.

Fortunately, the book was labeled properly and the recopied deed included mention of the book and page in Genesee County records. Even more fortunately, when I in turn went to Batavia, I was pleased to find that the original 1819 recording of the deed was far more legible than the 1854 copy!

The rewards of going to the original just keep coming.


Harold Henderson, "How Harry Porter's first deed was recorded in a county he had nothing to do with: Beware peripheral vision!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mostly Midwestern genealogy finds on and off the web

* The summer issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly includes a well-cited article by Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five Ferguson Brothers from Scotland."A bonus for me: ISGSQ is using footnotes instead of the dreaded endnotes.


* As usual, the Ohio Genealogy News is packed with instructional articles of interest. For Summer 2012, I particularly enjoyed:

Chris Staats' "Deed Anatomy 101" with a clever graphic;

Joyce Quigley's "Online Cemetery Research" (interment records!); and

Delores Jones's "My Last Name is Jones (Success with a Common Surname)": "The only way I found my Jones family in the 1930 U.S. census for Mississippi was by reading my late aunt's papers again."


* Whenever you're in a law library, take the opportunity to snoop around. During IGHR at Samford, some sharp-eyed Pennsylvania researchers found an unlikely treasure: county-level court case reports for several counties in Pennsylvania, mostly from the 20th century. Who knew?


* Joe Beine has updated his wonderful index to on-line indexes of death records of various kinds, including indexes for ten Midwestern counties:

in Illinois -- DeKalb, McDonough, Sangamon, and Will;

in Michigan -- Menominee, Oakland, and Wayne;

in Ohio -- Montgomery; and

in Wisconsin -- Barron and Eau Claire.





Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five Ferguson Brothers from Scotland,"Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 74-91.

Ohio Genealogy News, vol 43, no. 2 (Summer 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Midwestern genealogy finds on and off the web," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Midwestern Deeds On Line -- More or Less!

Finding local property transactions on line isn't easy. (I'm not talking about plat maps or lists of the first landowners, but the deeds and mortgages that record all buying and selling after that.)

Many county recorders have only recent records, say the last 10-60 years, on line -- and even this limited access seems tailored for the deep-pockets crowd. Some charge $5 per search or have subcontracted the access to places like countyrecords.com and landaccess.com. (I'm not opposed to paying for on-line convenience but that seems a little steep.) Genealogy-friendly on-line access seems rare, but it can't be as rare as my unsystematic searching has found!

FamilySearch has browseable deeds for two Midwestern counties:

* Outagamie County, Wisconsin (deeds 1867-1900, indexes 1870s-1957)

* Clay County, Minnesota (deeds 1825-1901 and later in a few books; grantee indexes 1879-1901, grantor 1839-1901)

In local initiatives:

* Will County, Illinois, has searchable grantor-grantee deed indexes 1836-1885, available through the Illinois Digital Archives (offering only surnames A-K in a user-unfriendly format) or through the Plainfield Public Library site Will County: Preserving History's Heritage (only very terse transcriptions of the index).

So far, the best I've found are in Ohio's Western Reserve, where direct free access to deeds of any age from:

* Cuyahoga County, Ohio's Fiscal Officer.

* Stark County, Ohio's Recorder. Complete a simple signup, sign in, and go to "archive search."

Sometimes the best solution is to go there. On line or off, it helps to be familiar with the many indexing systems used. (In Stark County the indexes are by first letter of surname, first letter of given name, and then chronological. There are good reasons for this but for the novice it can be challenging.)

But check around first and feel free to add to (or correct) this little list in the comments!

Harold Henderson, "Midwestern Deeds On Line -- More or Less!" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Indians had a property system too

McGill University historian Allan Greer gets down to the details of how European property rules took over the New World in an article in the April issue of the American Historical Review. It was not a case in which the Native Americans had no concept of property and the Europeans imposed it, he writes. Both groups had private/family ground where they grew crops, and various common areas that belonged to the larger group. There wasn't anything just lying around in either hemisphere that was free to all or in some kind of state of nature.

One way the European system won out was the practice of letting stock run free. "When settlers proclaimed, in effect, that the Indians' deer, fish, and timber were open to all, colonists included, yet the hogs and cattle roaming these same woods remained [the settlers'] private property, they were indeed attempting a wholesale appropriation."

By the time the settlers got around to actually fencing the Indians out, it was all over. The settlers' free-ranging hogs and cattle had destroyed both the native gardens and wildlife in the area. "Privatization of land was not the main mechanism by which indigenous territory came into the possession of colonizers; by the time that sort of enclosure occurred in many places, dispossession was already an accomplished fact, thinks in large measure to the intrusions of the colonial commons."

Greer cites a book I would like to read: Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York, 2004).


Allan Greer, "Commons and Enclosure in the Colonization of North America," American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 365-386.


Harold Henderson, “The Indians had a property system too,” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post.]

Blogs to watch

For researchers with western Michigan targets, Sonja Hunter is blogging about Kalamazoo-area records and repositories including one of my own faves, the Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collections. She's at Bushwhacking Genealogy.

For researchers who know you can't do real genealogy without property records, but are still hesitating to jump into the pool, Donna Moughty's blog, Donna Moughty's Genealogical Resources, has some recent posts to help those getting started. Here's her introductory post on federal-land states, which includes all the states regularly covered in this blog.

Property records are the superheroes of genealogy

Over at Archives.com, I have a bunch of examples of the powers of deeds, mortgages, and similar documents that can seem intimidating but are widely available and easy to use. Since I wrote it up, I attended an ancestral certificate ceremony where several of the awardees used deeds to prove their ancestors' residence in the county at an early date.

As for intimidating, once you have a basic idea of how the clerk's or recorder's office works, they are wonderful places to work: the office folks don't hover, let you go about your business, but can offer help if needed.

Required reading for those who don't use deeds

Among its many other offerings, the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center has a blog. Recently librarian Dawne Slater-Putt, CG, contributed a two-part post, "Digging into Deed Records," full of examples of genealogical information of all kinds that can be found in deeds -- and in some cases can only be found there.

IMO -- she didn't put it this way at all! -- genealogists who don't use this readily available record type are cheating themselves, and quite possibly creating their own brick walls.

Methodology Monday with more spiral research

The research day that rudely pushed blog posting aside also provided some fodder. One of today's projects involves several lawsuits with almost two dozen people suing and being sued, many of them related and the rest probably so. The lawsuits themselves appear to have vanished from official custody at some point in the past century or two, so it's especially important to glean all possible information from the relevant property records. (Naturally the lawsuits were about property and inheritance!)

The first time I hit the deed books I didn't yet have all the family names; when I returned with a full list of names (from one especially informative deed) I found four more deeds. One had actually been recorded in response to the conclusion of one of the lawsuits. Another was a deed of trust spelling out various descendants' shares resulting from a partition suit (one of the missing lawsuits). Now those deeds have suggested that certain additional lawsuits indexed in the clerk's office may be relevant. Hopefully they have not absconded too.

We always berate ourselves for having to go back -- and we should if it was just inadequate preparation -- but often doing so is part of a natural and necessary learning process. We are chronological animals, and as someone said, time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen all at once.

Department of Minutely Detailed Information in NW Indiana

Few things are more annoying to the time-challenged genealogist than a batch of big heavy index books in sequence with no dates on them. If that happens to be your predicament in the Lake County, Indiana, Recorder's office, and you're looking for a mortgage, I can help. The deed indexes are all nicely labeled, but mortgages are another matter. In the General Index of Mortgages there, roughly speaking,

Book 2 = 1878-1889
Book 3 = 1889-1896
Book 4 = 1896-1901
Book 5 = 1901-1905
Book 6 = 1906-1909
Book 7 = 1909-1911
Book 8 = 1911-1913
Book 9 = 1913-1915
Book 10 = 1915-1916
Book 11 = 1916-1918
Book 12 = 1918-1919
Book 13 = 1919-1920

(Book 1 was wedged so tightly into its slot that I didn't even try to dislodge it. Fortunately my research targets were post-1878.) I was mostly looking at the mortgagor books, not mortgagees, but Lake seems to like to keep the two sets of index books in similar date ranges.

A law professor treads close to genealogy

Tanya Marsh did some research on the close-up history of Indianapolis's Brightwood neighborhood, using Sanborn maps and other resources. Read more at PropertyProf Blog. Hat tip to Legal History Blog.

Genealogy in social media

A wee bit of civil controversy appeared on the Association of Professional Genealogists mailing list last week (under the heading, "Facebook for Genealogists genealogywise"), as posters took note of the increased popularity of Facebook among our crowd, and the appearance of Genealogywise, which is basically facebook for genealogists.

Do these sites add value beyond sociability and (for practicing professionals) exposure? (There are other sites but I haven't done them -- in fact, the burden of having to track multiple social media was one issue discussed.)

On Facebook, the Geneabloggers group distributes blogging tips and invitations to various carnivals, which are convenient although probably just as doable by e-mail.

On Genealogywise, which is pretty new, the groups so far consist of people listing their surnames or asking if anyone has heard of anything that will solve their problem. For those who are (in Tom Jones's juxtaposition) more interested in genealogy than in ancestors, it was interesting to see Ginger Smith's post in the Indiana Genealogy group of some images from the handwritten grantors index to Putnam County deeds, Volume 3, April 1824 - Aug 1863, for surnames beginning with the letters T-Z. She invites visitors to post their transcriptions.

Of course, it's not like Indiana doesn't already have a major transcription project under way, but doing this kind of thing on Genealogywise might attract some new participants . . . and get people thinking about the stupendous mountain of valuable records out there (the deeds themselves) that are undigitized and likely to remain so.