1960 railroad resource (new lookup)

Last week at a local antique store I picked up a copy of issue no. 263 of The Pocket List of Railroad Officials, a book that, among other things, provides a nationwide alphabetical index of more than 20,000 railroad officials (management, NOT rank and file employees -- roughly down to local freight agents, traffic managers, and track superintendents), as of approximately the last week of July 1960.

The book includes a listing of more than 500 advertisers, companies that supplied the railroads, listed alphabetically with mid-level sales officials, such as agents of Caterpillar Tractor Co. in Waco, Joplin, Colusa, Aberdeen, and other locations.

I have not found this 1000-page booklet in libraries or on line. I've listed it at Midwest Roots among my other on-line lookups.




The Pocket List of Railroad Officials no. 263, Third Quarter 1960 (New York: The Railway Equipment and Publication Co., 1960).


Harold Henderson, "1960 railroad resource (new lookup)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Railroads, Economic History, and Your Ancestors

Neither of the following sources is new on line, but they're both new to me, and perhaps to you.

The EH.net Encyclopedia of Economic and Business History, part of the Economic History Association, has more than 140 articles by good authorities writing on topics they know about, including agriculture, apprentices, banking, bankruptcy, the 1893 depression, the Dust Bowl, Freedmen's Bureau, fur trade, Gold Rush, indentured servitude, insurance, the Confederate economy, the Revolutionary War, slavery, turnpikes, and toll roads. It's comforting to know that if you need a history of the US carpet industry, it's here. Not to mention fire insurance, or Sweden's economy from 1800.

I do not recommend quoting them as gospel, for three reasons. One, each article is followed by a number of references so that it's possible to do some comparative research and not just a lookup. Two, these are economists and sometimes they can have a rather blinkered view of human actions and motivations. Three, the site's terms of use seem rather strict. All in all, it's better to understand multiple sources, put that understanding in your own words, and cite. (Each article comes with a suggested citation.)


The University of Missouri at St. Louis has the American Railroad Journal, a weekly, issues 1832-1857, 1865-1878, 1887, 1888, and 1890-1900. (Hat tip: Internet Scout Report.) It's well presented and easy to navigate and search, but has little descriptive material about the site or the gaps in holdings. The periodical is every word searchable and it has unpredictable amounts of information on plank roads and canals as well as business and technical arcana about railroads in general as they were growing up. (Other sites, including HathiTrust Digital Library, have some issues -- and some that UMSL lacks -- but are more difficult to navigate, and seem to have included different magazines under this one title.)

Even genealogists with one-track minds will find material here. The magazine, usually based in New York City, included marriage and death notices in many of its 1833 issues. Its title changed over time, beginning as Rail-Road Journal (January 1832), and changing variously to American Railroad Journal and Advocate of Internal Improvements (January 1837), American Railroad Journal and Mechanics' Magazine (January 1842), American Railroad Journal: Steam Navigation, Commerce, Mining, Manufactures (January 1853), The Railroad and Engineering Journal (January 1887: "the oldest railroad paper in the world"), American Engineer and Railroad Journal (January 1900), and more.

What I have seen indicates a closer focus on railroad business and stocks and bonds than on those who worked in the business, but there is a great deal to explore here -- and a wealth of as-it-happened information and speculation that is often painted over in large-scale histories. And you've gotta love the cute woodcut mastheads from the early days!



Robert Whaples, editor, "Encyclopedia -- Custom," EH.net (http://eh.net/encyclopedia/ : accessed 10 August 2012).

"American Railroad Journal, Full Text, 1832-1900," John W. Barriger III National Railroad Library, St. Louis Mercantile Library, University of Missouri - St. Louis, University of Missouri Digital Library (http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/ : accessed 10 August 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Railroads, Economic History, and Your Ancestors," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Resources: Everywhere West!

The Newberry Library has Everywhere West: Preserving and Enhancing Access to the Records of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company. The site includes an informative blog; project manager Alison Hinderliter recently posted about using CB&Q land records to track a Swedish immigrant in Iowa. The collection itself covers a wide variety of corporate records from 1840 to 1965 and occupies more than half a mile of shelf space.

My idea of a good citation to a particular non-digitized item in the collection (subject to revision if I ever get to work with it!): Axel Frisk, Application to Buy Land In Iowa no. 2978, Montgomery County, 8 April 1874; volume [not known], series 752.4, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago.

Comment: This project would not have happened without a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And that in turn would not have been possible if the CB&Q land records had not been recalled from Harvard University's Baker Library in 1946 and placed at the Newberry instead. For those who don't know, Baker explicitly excludes all genealogists as non-scholars. I trust that those choosing where to donate money and historic papers will treat that institution as it treats them.

Pearls from the past . . . week

Miami County, Ohio, marriages 1807-1865

The Inner Life of Empires:An Eighteenth-Century History by Emma Rothschild -- the British Empire of the 1700s told through the Johnstone family. Bernard Bailyn says, "An extraordinary book, weaving back and forth between microhistory and the greater world..."

Kimberly Powell separates two Louis Volants -- one of them J. K. Rowling's great-grandfather -- in the most substantive and carefully argued blog post I've seen anywhere lately.

Do you feel a need to watch train wrecks? My favorite SW Michigan blog reviews a new book on Michigan train disasters 1900-1940, and draws a useful research lesson I had never heard of before.

Context files: Did your ancestor clear a Midwestern farm in the 1850s?

Economists Jeremy Atack and Robert Margo have confirmed what most of us might have expected: that the coming of the railroads in the 1850s did encourage Midwestern farmers to clear more land. That's the gist of their new paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research (full access by purchase or university affiliation).

The authors identified 278 counties in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Missouri that didn't change their boundaries, and compared land-clearing activity in counties that got a railroad during the 1850s with those that didn't. For many reasons the figures can't be precise, but they figure that between 1/4 and 2/3 of the land-clearing activity was inspired by railroad access, and the cheaper transportation and higher crop prices that it promised.

"Whatever else might have led Midwestern farmers to undertake the back-breaking labor of clearing their land," they conclude, "no other single factor seems likely to be as important as the potential gains from trade deriving from the arrival of the Iron Horse."

Your ancestor's been working on the railroad

Craig Pfannkuche, of the McHenry County and Chicago genealogical societies, and of the Chicago & Northwestern History Society, made a strong case at last week's Illinois State Genealogical Society conference for genealogists to pay a lot more attention to railroad records.

How come? At least four reasons: the railroads were the largest single industrial employer in the US in the 19th century; they were record-intensive operations, having to run widely scattered operations consistently and efficiently; they were labor-intensive operations, and needed to hire people of almost all trades, and none; and many of their records have been lovingly preserved by both general-purpose archives and by history societies like the CNWHS. If the listing linked above doesn't make you drool, check your pulse.

Better yet, Pfannkuche, as genealogical chairman of this latter group, will respond at no charge to requests for lookups -- if you have a reasonable idea of the time, place, and railroad your people may have been involved with. Given that tiny hamlets with no visible rail presence today were often thriving centers of activity a century or more ago, that requirement may not be as hard to fulfill as you think.

See the Midwest 60 years ago

The Newberry Library has been able to digitize and place online a selection of the 3,000 photographs taken in the late 1940s for the 1955 centennial of the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railroad. It's not just railroad shots, either -- a Chicago fruit auctioneer, commuters waiting for the smoke-belching locomotive to haul them downtown, yard ornaments in Princeton, a Memorial Day parade in Galesburg, a coal mine in Fiatt. You will probably not see your Midwestern ancestors, but you will see some of what they saw.

This online exhibit -- "Daily Life along the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad" -- is just a fragment of the Newberry's 5,000 cubic feet of CB&Q archives, which "mainly document the nineteenth century operations of the Burlington and its component roads. Beyond their significance for the study of nineteenth century railroad history and labor history, the archives are a relatively unexplored and valuable resource for those interested in topics related to the social and economic development of the region served by the CB&Q." The archives are said to be "relatively unexplored." Who said the frontier was closed?

Getting There in 1848 and 1870

"Did Railroads Induce or Follow Economic Growth? Urbanization and Population Growth in the American Midwest 1850-1860" (PDF, National Bureau of Economic Research) Four economists have researched the effect of railroad development on Midwestern settlement between 1850 and 1860. If you're like me, you'll read the introduction and the historical information about how fast the new transportation mode developed (and how Ohio tried to quash it to protect the state's investment in canals!), skip most of the technical part, and check out the conclusions. It turns out that (if I have got it right) railroads didn't speed up settlement, but they did speed up urbanization. Not surprising given that they can't stop everywhere and therefore are a centralizing technology.

And then you'll discover that they footnote some very interesting old railroad and ship travel guides. (In order to measure the effect of railroads, they had to know exactly where they were when.) The links didn't all work for me. These are the ones I found, either directly or after a little fooling around, and I'm pretty sure there are more. These are extremely cool resources if you have folks migrating to or through the Old Northwest in this era:

Appletons' Railroad and Steamboat Companion, 1848 (Google Book Search)

1870 railroad map, not sourced

Travelers' Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States & Canada, June 1870. Note the prematurely psychedelic cover typography and the long list of local times.

Grain Dealers' and Shippers' Gazetteer, evidently 1891 (as digitized by Pam Rietsch), accessible one railroad line at a time. The maps are awesome; the gazetteer part contains names as well.

For further searching, check out the University of Texas's justly famous Perry-Castaneda Map Collection (no tilde available on blogger?).

Was Your Ancestor Working on the Illinois Central Railroad?

If you have Chicago or Illinois connections, keep an eye on Sharon Williams' Chicago history portal/blog, "Chicago History: The Journal of an Amateur Historian." I certainly will.

I haven't begun to explore this whole site -- her posts are delightfully eclectic -- but here's one juicy microhistorical/genealogical item 'way down on her blogroll equivalent (and something I should have known about long ago), the"Digitized Book of the Week" from the library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Out of many curious postings here (further exploration and monitoring is a must), I found a year-old post on their digitized volumes of the Illinois Central Magazine (1914-1924) for employees.

In this digital treasure chest, the genealogical jewels are concentrated at the end of each issue under "Divisional News." The July 1914 news for the Illinois Division, Chicago District, includes a marriage announcement which fully names the bride but describes the groom only as "Brakeman McLaughlin." We also learn where dispatcher H. H. Weatherford just spent his vacation (Milwaukee), and where "trainmen's caller" John Wilson was about to spend his (Havana [Illinois]). Geo. Starkey secured a leave of absence from his unnamed job to visit a sick relative in Los Angeles. Good stuff. BTW, the IC magazine also profiled towns along its route.

Get railroaded for free

Genealogy conferences and travel can run into real money. If you're on a tight budget and anywhere near the public-transit-commuting fringes of the Chicago area (Kenosha, Woodstock, Elgin, Aurora, Joliet, South Bend), consider the Newberry Library's free two-day spring workshop May 30-31, "Railroad Ancestors." (Advance registration is required.)

So many genealogy programs are beginner stuff; this looks to be a step up, provided of course it would help if you have relevant research targets! Friday speakers are Martin Tuohy on government records for railroad workers, Jim Metlicka on Railroad Retirement Board records, and Craig Pfannkuche on Chicago and Northwestern Railroad archives. Saturday it's all Paula Stuart-Warren all the time, on railroad history, indexes and finding aids, and "Midwestern River People." Her blog is here.

The Newberry is home to the massive Pullman Company archives, blogged earlier.