Michigan School Records

Genealogy is so local. If you didn't know Michigan and needed to consult school records, you might despair. These records are often lost; if not lost, they tend to be scattered in local repositories; and if in repositories, they are rarely catalogued and even more rarely indexed.

So you would be very happy to find Archives of Michigan's five-year-old circular listing its holdings from two dozen counties, with records as early as 1843 and as recent as 1982. And if your folks happened to be around Grand Rapids a century or so ago, you'd be overjoyed to find the Western Michigan Genealogical Society's on-line index to annual school censuses of Kent County 1903-1925 (over 200,000 listings). But that's only the beginning. Lansing and Grand Rapids are good destinations, but so is Decatur.

Decatur? In Van Buren County? Population under 2000? Not even the county seat (that honor being reserved for Paw Paw)?

Yes, because Decatur is also the home of the Van Buren District Library's Local History Collection, which in turn is the home of the Bess Britton One-Room Schoolhouse Collection: eight wide-body file drawers of material covering 80 of 83 counties, 4770 schools, and 58,616 records.

I hasten to add that not all the schools have records and not all counties have equal coverage. The VBRGS blog has more information on the collection in three posts from earlier this year: part one, part two, and part three.

The collection itself is not on line, but various indexes are. For researchers who can pinpoint their family in a target county (or better, township), the geographical index may work best although it is reported to be partial. There is also a 954-page PDF available listing all the schools in alphabetical order (browseable only).

Those hoping to do a broadcast name search are not going to do so well. Ancestry.com hosts a spreadsheet of names and locations, which can be browsed or searched. As far as I have been able to tell, the browse function is slow (100 names at a time and you have to start with A), but the search function pulls up results from all of Ancestry's institutional holdings. So browsing may be the better choice. Going to Decatur may be the best.

And if you have figured out how to work around those browse and search functions, let us all in on the secret before you take off on that road trip!



Harold Henderson, "Michigan School Records," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New on Midwest Roots

I've added nine more free lookups at Midwest Roots for a total of sixteen.

LA PORTE COUNTY

* La Porte, Indiana, city directories for 1971, 1984, 1987.

* Index to the Justice of the Peace records for New Durham Township, La Porte County, Indiana,1879-1906. (Surnames listed on web site.)

* Harold Henderson, comp., In Court In La Porte: An Every-Name Index to the First Legal Proceedings in La Porte County, Indiana [prior to 1836] (La Porte: Blurb.com, 2011).

INDIANA

* DAR-transcribed St. Joseph County, Indiana, marriage records 1830-1855, 1886-1906 (not the originals).

* Eric Pumroy with Paul Brockman, A Guide to Manuscript Collections of the Indiana Historical Society and Indiana State Library (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1986).

* Charles Alexander Martin, ed., Alumnal Record DePauw University (Greencastle IN: DePauw, 1910).

* Dorothy L. Riker, comp., Genealogical Sources Reprinted from the Genealogy Section of Indiana Magazine of History (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1979).

* Ronald L. Baker and Marvin Carmony, Indiana Place Names (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975)

ILLINOIS

* Almost 100 Flint-Thrall family letters 1870-1898, mostly from, to, and about southern Illinois.

* 1931 yearbook of Tilden Technical High School, Chicago.

* Edward Callary, Place Names of Illinois (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

MICHIGAN

* Walter Romig, Michigan Place Names (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).

BEYOND

* Margaret R. Waters, Dorothy Ruiker, and Doris Leistner, Abstracts of Obituaries in the Western Christian Advocate 1834-1850 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1988).

* Karen Livsey, Western New York Land Transactions, 1804-1824, Extracted from the Archives of the Holland Land Company (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1991).


Harold Henderson, "New on Midwest Roots," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Lost Schoolhouses in St. Joseph County

The feature article in the October South Bend Area Genealogical Society Quarterly Newsletter is by Sadie Stuck on "The Lost Schoolhouses of St. Joseph County." She enumerates every township, but not every school. It would appear that a lot of them have literally been forgotten -- as in, "The only other school known to have existed [in Union Township] is one of unknown name built in 1939 at 64500 Kenilworth Road." And this is not the only such case.

As the old play asks, "Are we so soon forgot?" Just seventy years ago and even its name is unremembered? Perhaps there is more information out there, but I found this to be a very sobering article. Forgetting is real, forgetting happens.

October News from Wisconsin

The new issue of the Wisconsin State Genealogical Society Newsletter (membership required) includes a bird's-eye view of the combined libraries of the Marathon County Historical Society and the Marathon County Genealogical Society. The available goodies include high-school yearbooks from 1919, wills and probates 1850-1918, Wausau city directories and telephone books from 1883, various church records 1860-2003, school censuses 1919-1962, plat books from 1882, and a marriage index 1899-1960.

It's a must-see if you have research targets in north central Wisconsin. As always, call ahead to check on hours and availability.

Partial Saturday in Little Rock -- sign a petition for the Library of Michigan!

I had to leave early on the last day of the FGS conference, but did pick up a few thoughts:

* Got an ancestor in the 1830 census and no idea where he or she lived, because the county wasn't yet divided into townships? As part of the discussion of her "sure-fire never-fail" "5-P test for proving identity," Elizabeth Shown Mills gave a whirlwind demonstration of how to use census neighbors' landholdings to track the path of the census taker and thus locate individuals who hadn't purchased land.

* Paula Stuart Warren went through at least 20 different kinds of school records (I lost count) and almost as many different places to find them.

* Richard Sayre gave the nuts and bolts of topographic maps and the relevant coordinate systems. This seems to have been map day, because he too wound up showing how to correlate a variety of maps to find the exact present-day location of an ancestral farm, using online sources.

I was especially disappointed to miss Tom Jones on "Solving Problems with Original Sources," including such rarely consulted sources as Revolutionary War pension final payment vouchers, Federal district court papers, and "loose" probate papers (that is, the evidence and forms filed in the case, as opposed to the matter copied and preserved in will and probate record books). Fortunately, this session, like most, was to be recorded on CD by Jamb Tapes, Inc. of St. Louis and hopefully will soon be available via their web site. Their people had a several-times-daily aerobic workout coordinating the recording of speakers at far opposite ends of the Peabody Hotel and Statehouse Convention Center complex.

State-level news: Illinois has started planning for hosting the 2011 FGS in Springfield. And the joint FGS-NGS Records Preservation and Access Committee has started an on-line petition to save the Library of Michigan. The legislature can still reject the governor's ill-advised executive order that would disperse the library's collections; so far only one house has acted.

Did your ancestor keep quiet in study hall?

When in doubt, read everything. There's not usually a lot of genealogical meat in Midwestern newspapers as old as 1855, but you just never know.

C. B. Smith was teaching school in Sterling, Whiteside County, Illinois, that spring, and he told his students that he would publish in the local newspaper "the names of all those who would not whisper in study hours for ten weeks; also the names of those who should whisper but once, or twice, or three times during the same period." And he did, in a "Communication" to the editor of the Sterling Times and Whiteside County Advertiser, 29 March 1855, page 3, column 2 (microfilm via interlibrary loan from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library).

No school census for Whiteside County that year? No problem:

NOT AT ALL

John Aumont
Isaac Bryson
Marian Fassett
Catharine Price
Ellen Colder
Emma Wilson
Ruth Brink
Amos Miller
Alonzo Colder
Kate Wallace
Emma Colder [hmm, these names could be Golder]
Emily Worthington
Ann E. Wilson
Angie Stebbins
Sarah King

BUT ONCE
Jacob Bryson
Caroline Sackett
Josephine Worthington
Sarah Stebbins
J. G. Manahan
Mary Worthington
Frances Galt
Josephine Galt

BUT TWICE
William Penrose
Frances Fassett

BUT THREE TIMES

Robt Penrose

Concluded Smith, "The evil is in great measure eradicated."

"The poor man's Harvard"

You may be missing a research resource if you don't know what Valparaiso University was called before 1906. VU's special collections and archives hold records and pictures going back to the founding of the Valparaiso Male and Female College by Methodists in 1859, and its resurrection as a proprietary institution, the Northern Indiana Normal School and Business Institute in 1873. The NINSBI was marketed as an affordable school, hence the promotional nickname. It became Valparaiso College in 1900, took on the current name in 1906, and became a Lutheran institution in 1925.

The archives include commencement programs from 1869, student transcripts 1919-1969 and some ledger books before that, university catalogs 1875-1918 (medical, dental, and pharmacy had their own), some 6000 pre-1925 alumni cards now in the process of being digitized, yearbooks from 1905, student newspapers (the Torch) from 1914, and more. None of these collections is complete and indexes are few; if you think maybe your research target attended school in the area somewhere, sometime, this is not the place to start a fishing expedition. The institution included a high school and a preparatory school, whose records are included. Also a century ago it seems to have been attracting a surprising variety of students from overseas, including Korea and Russia.

(Hat tip to special collections librarian Judith Kimbrell Miller's presentation to the La Porte County Genealogical Society.)

Illinois' Winter 2008 Quarterly

The Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly does a better than average job of publishing more than record transcriptions. In the Winter 2008 issue editor Oriene Morrow Springstroh organizes them under the heading of "Telling Our Stories." "Don't be discouraged if your children or grandchildren aren't interested in what you have to say right now," she advises. "There are others to follow in the coming generations who wil cherish your words and be glad to meet you through the work you have done for them. They will also wish you had written more." In the issue:

"Coffee Time," by Gary K. Hargis

"Olivia's Story," by Jane Gwynn Haldeman

"James Miller Morrow of DuPage County, Illinois -- In His Own Words"

"Faces from the Past -- Identifying Photos with Marge Rice"

"How to Start a Writing Group for Your Society," by Oriene Morrow Springstroh

*"Using School Record Books," by Robert W. Frenz, with a focus on McHenry County

"Ask the Retoucher!" by Eric Curtis M. Basir

"Family Bible Collection," comp. Kristy Lawrie Gravlin

* footnoted.

Brown County, Wisconsin, and its neighbors

As far as I can tell, the Wisconsin Digital Collections are just too big to understand in one gulp. Today I'm intrigued by the "subcollection" called "Brown, Door, Kewaunee, Oconto, and Shawano Counties: Historical Atlases, Directories, Plat Maps, and High School Yearbooks." The coverage area is basically the great cheesehead town of Green Bay and the counties north and east of it.

At first I was disappointed, as the yearbooks didn't seem to be browseable. But if you do a full-text search of the entire 86-volume subcollection, you can then browse throughout whichever yearbooks where you happen to have a hit. (The Okato for 20 December 1922 includes a receipts-and-expenditures statement for the preceding football season, itemized game by game, naming referees, umpires, and suppliers. Can you imagine?)

Naturally my fave is the 1874 Green Bay and Fort Howard Directory, compiled and arranged by (I swear it's true) J. Alfred Dull. The school yearbooks and newspapers are from the 1909-1929 time period. Brown County has four years' atlases, the earliest being an 1889 plat book. Door County has four atlases 1899-1923, the earliest including a directory of landowners by township. Kewaunee and Shawano each have two atlases. Don't you wish every state was like Wisconsin?

Toledo Treasures

(Whew -- 18,000 words later, it's good to be back!)

If you have research targets in the tri-state area, specifically Toledo, Old Toledo Yearbooks is for you. In form it's a blog, but if you click on the tabs or the items in the right-hand menu called "pages," you can see six entire scanned yearbooks from various schools from 1907, 1918, 1922, 1936, 1940, and 1942. "The Scroll" yearbook for St. Ursula Academy includes handwritten notations that appear to be the jobs or engagements the young women had following graduation. Questions? You can leave a comment on the blog.

The unnamed blogger also appears to have another Toledo-related blog/site, Life with Blue Grandma, with entries from the daily diary of Mary Helen Harris of Toledo. She kept a diary from 1931 to 1972; unfortunately only five months have been posted, and none since last January.

Six more reasons to join IGS!

The Indiana Genealogical Society has added six new databases to its members-only resource section. In addition to the six public databases, members now can search 28 Indiana databases: 7 of county records, 3 church records, 8 military records, 8 school records, and 2 miscellaneous (what I would call political records). Your idea of how to categorize them may vary.

These are databases, not original images, so they're most valuable as searching tools and pointers to the original source, which should be checked to guard against typographical and other errors. In order to browse any given database, just bring up the blank search form and click the search button.

Among the new offerings are enumerations from Marion County, and the list of deceased Methodist ministers (as of 1917) from northern Indiana, taken from the notoriously under-indexed book History of the North Indiana Conference by Herrick and Sweet.

Hat tip to the IGS blog. Membership page is here.

Chicago Genealogist for Fall

The Chicago Genealogical Society's flagship publication continues a spree of featuring an under-utilized class of records, including high-school graduates of 60 years ago expressing ambitions they might not enjoy hearing about today...

"Austin High School, 'The Maroon & White' Yearbook, June Class of 1948," submitted by Jeanne Larzalere Bloom.

"John L. Marsh Grammar School, Graduation Class of February 1935," submitted by Richard L. Salik.

"Confirmation Class of March 25, 1934, Ev.Lutheran Church, Windsor Park, Chicago," submitted by Richard L. Salik.

Illuminating Lake County Illinois History

That's a new more-or-less-twice-a-week blog by Diana Dretske in her capacity as collections coordinator for the Lake County, Illinois, history archives outside Wauconda: Illuminating Lake County, Illinois History. Like its neighbor the colorful Lake County Discovery Museum and its virtual neighbor the Curt Teich Postcard Archives, the archives are under the umbrella of the Lake County Forest Preserves.

My research lately has kept me coming back to Lake County (which FYI is in the extreme upper-right-hand corner of Illinois, squeezed between Chicago and Wisconsin and fronting on Lake Michigan), so I may be biased or just zoned out from too many two-hour commutes across the Chicago metropolitan area, but I found the material quite interesting.

Recent history posts include looks back at JFK's 1960 campaign swing through the county; Swan School in Fremont Township, a sample of the archives' holdings of material on 52 local schools, most now gone; the North Shore Line; and one of Lake County's funnier products, Jack Benny of Waukegan.

Genealogists with young descendants to entertain can make strategic simultaneous use of the museum and archives (not to mention the beautiful forest preserve grounds). As with any archive, do your homework and call ahead to arrange a productive visit.

Old Ohio Schools

Find pictures of past and present Ohio schools in 31 counties at Old Ohio Schools. No actual hard-core genealogy here, but how great to see where your ancestor went.

Chicago Genealogist, Summer issue

From the Chicago Genealogical Society:

"Additional Late 19th and Early 20th Century Chicagoans in Photographs," by Craig Pfannkuche

"St. Thomas the Apostle High School: Classes of 1939-1942," submitted by Ellen C. Courtney

"The Family of James Joscelyne," by Ben Joscelyne

"Saint Dominic High School --'The Torch' Yearbook, 1956," submitted by Joseph L. Rhodes

"Wedding Photograph of Otto Daniel Meister and Agnes Uber," submitted by Doris Carlson Sturm

"St. Francis de Sales High School, Graduating Class of 1954," submitted by Thoams J. Draus

A Century of Chicago Public School Graduates

The Chicago Public School system has established a networking site for its alumni at CPSalumni.org, and it's also very serviceable for their friends and relations and genealogists. Free registration is required (non-alums can register as guests), and your password gives access to the two "halves" of the site.

The first half consists of web pages, one for each school, with a few historical notes and (already) some alum-contributed data on favorite memories, distinguished teachers or graduates, and the like.

The other half consists of PDF images of the school board minutes for each year from 1873 through 1973, listing names of graduates. You reach these images by clicking on the generic graduation photo labeled "Get historical attendee records" halfway down the right side of every school page.

Graduates are listed citywide by year. Each year is its own PDF file, so it'll help if you know roughly when you expect to find your research target. Within each year they're listed alphabetically by school , and then within each school alphabetically by name. I found my immigrant grandfather graduating from Calumet High School in 1898, and my father graduating from Tilden Tech in 1931. My grandfather's class consisted of nine girls and nine boys; five of the boys and two of the girls took the college preparatory course. You can measure the progress of universal education by timing your downloads: 1898 is a lot faster than 1931!

From 1873 to 1895 the only records are high-school admissions, that is, elementary-school graduates and those who passed proficiency tests. High-school graduates are listed starting in 1896. Early on there's little identifying information, but in later years the record does include elementary-school graduates' dates of last vaccination (1901) or birth dates (1972-3). (BTW, all this information was already public.) The Newberry Library blog reports they're already using the site to answer people's questions.

School records aren't always the first things we think of but they're well worth pursuing. And if you need a boost of ancestral self-esteem, remember: a century ago, a high-school diploma was a more elite achievement than a four-year college degree is today.