Good news for New York researchers!

The Internet Scout Report tells about the New York State Library's new collection of "Selected Digital Historical Documents," that is, resources for finding historical materials about the Empire State, such as laws (including revised statutes of 1829 and 1882), and a list of bibliographies and indexes of state documents. Revolutionary and Civil War holdings are also available.

Don't miss the statistical summaries of the state censuses, which have what could be backhanded information about individuals (if you can identify them) as well as contextual information on what was happening in particular towns. The Town of Amity in Allegany County, for instance, had no lunatics, two idiots (both under 21), eleven sawmills, one distillery (producing $1100 worth of distilled product), and one ashery. I have mainly used these summaries to compare my research target's land and production with the town or county average.

Also don't miss the 1981 publication that gives a full listing of questions asked each year in both state and federal censuses.

The interface here is not ideal. The above-mentioned publication places original page 43 on digital page 49, for instance.


Harold Henderson, "Good news for New York researchers!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 November 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Your Unsourced Undated Newspaper Clipping, Blogging, and Michigan State Censuses

Sometimes other genealogists provoke us to remember things we had forgotten.

* I once had one of those classic unlabeled newspaper clippings, one that would gain credibility if it could be properly sourced. And there is one often distinctive identifier that even the most clueless newspaper-clipper can't erase: the font, typeface, and layout. Fortunately I had reason to think that it belonged to a particular town and an approximate point in time. I made a copy of it and took it to the local library, and compared it to the two local newspapers being published then. One of them matched, reducing the search time required to find the original -- but not to zero!

* Wondering what to blog about, or whether even to start? Although I don't use them, Geneabloggers offers a myriad of "blogging prompts" keyed to days of the week. There are some basic decisions to make: do you want mainly to contribute original material, or be an aggregator of others (by mentioning and linking, not wholesale copying!)? In either case, what really "gets you going" about genealogy: a particular region? methodology? theory? family stories? technology? conferences and institutes? Start out with a focus based on the passion within your passion; over time you will find that it changes, as this blog has. Finally, plan a schedule and work far enough ahead of it so that you can read your draft posts "cold" one more time before publishing them. That way you can be a perfectionist within reason and still get it done.

* I've said this before, and now I'm saying it again: if you have Michigan people, you should be reading Bushwhacking Genealogy, which just reported on progress in digitizing early Michigan state censuses.




Harold Henderson, "Your Unsourced Undated Newspaper Clipping, Blogging, and Michigan State Censuses," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 April 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Michiganders, man the telephones!

News via the Winter 2010 print newsletter of the Michigan Genealogical Council:

The Library of Michigan is alive, but it has a new URL (www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan) and it's about to take a 20% budget whack. (Call your legislators!) So far they are still able to cooperate with the Archives (which now has a different budget source) in putting records on line. State census records may be next.

Midwestern sources at Family Search Labs

Several blogs and email lists alerted me to new database items with original items at FamilySearch Labs' Record Search. Here's the current list of Midwestern sources available there:

Illinois: Diocese of Belleville, Catholic Parish Records 1729-1956 (browsable only)

Michigan: Births 1867-1902, Marriages 1868-1925, Deaths 1867-1897 (searchable and browsable)

Ohio: Deaths 1908-1953 (searchable and browsable)

Wisconsin: State Censuses 1855, 1875, 1885, 1895, 1905 (browsable only)

This is both an opportunity to make new searches in sources difficult to find before, and an opportunity to "clean up" your existing records with higher-quality sources.

What's old in Hamilton County, Illinois

Southern Illinois' Hamilton County (county seat McLeansboro) has a historical society whose website is new on Cyndi's List, including a listing of the society's next meeting (unfortunately in March), the location and hours of its museum and genealogical library, and its publications -- including oral histories taken in 1978 and recently transferred to CDs and made available for sale.

If you have folks in this part of the world, Linkpendium has a good set of links and the Hamilton County GenWeb site has some unusual transcriptions including state censuses of 1855 and 1865.

So it comes as rather a disappointment that out of the 36,000 or so people in my genealogy database, including a bunch of southern Illinoisans, no one (yet!) has a connection there.