A Genealogy Christmas . . .

You didn't want to get anything done today, anyway! Good and potentially good things (I haven't looked at them all yet), moving from west to east . . .

* Chicago in Maps, cartographer Dennis McClendon's on-line collection of Chicago maps from 1834 to 2014.

* M. Susan Murnane's new book, Bankruptcy in an Industrial Society: A History of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2014), said to be "a social and institutional history of the Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio. The work explains the development of the court and the story of the people who worked there and of those who sought refuge in the bankruptcy court, within the context of northern Ohio's changing economy."

* Friend and colleague Amy E. K. Arner's new book, Abstracts of Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, Tax Records 1815 (Berwyn Heights, MD: Heritage Books, 2014).

* Not new at all: Historian Thomas Bender's Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978): "There were apparently two populations in nineteenth-century towns, an economically successful permanent group who shaped the values and direction of social life in the town, and a floating, largely unsuccessful group. We know little about those who left nineteenth-century towns." By contrast, in his view, "in contemporary America, men and women do not so much move from one town to another as follow an advantageous career path that may take them to a number of basically incidental locations." {93} Now the successful are the floaters?!





Harold Henderson, "A Genealogy Christmas . . . ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 14 December 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Nine indexes and finding aids on the web site

Continuing our holiday observance of free, here are five indexes and four finding aids available in full for your consultation at Midwestroots.net:

INDIANA

1857 Porter County, Indiana, Assessor's Book (all townships)

1902-1933 Indiana small city directories on microfilm; where to find specific cities and years on 5 otherwise unlabeled films, Adams County to Winchester.

List of Indiana newspapers available at the Mishawaka Heritage Center.

Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne: The Genealogist's Unofficial One-Stop Guide to the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center

ILLINOIS

1902-1933 Illinois small city directories on microfilm: where to find specific cities and years on 12 otherwise unlabeled films, Addison to Winfield.

MICHIGAN

1902-1935 Michigan small city directories on microfilm: where to find specific cities and years  on 7 otherwise unlabeled films, Allegan to Sturgis. 

MIDWEST
List of Midwestern city directories available on microfilm at the Valparaiso Public Library.

NEW YORK

Estate Papers 1807-1930, Box 2, Allegany County, New York, indexed by name and initial image number as found in the FamilySearch collection, “New York, Probate Records, 1629-1972.” These would be deaths in the 1830s and 1840s.

FHL MICROFILM

FHL microfilms already in the Midwest, including a listing by number of those held at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center.



Harold Henderson, "Nine indexes and finding aids on the web site," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

Three Brothers Northamer: More NGSQ Genealogy Olympics

No vital records, no church records, no helpful probates or deeds, no useful pension records, no useful guardianships -- how is a Pennsylvania genealogist to identify which of three brothers fathered Jacob Northamer and William Northamer in the late 1700s? Not from family speculations, as it turned out.

Northamer descendants Catherine Becker Wiest Desmarais, CG, and Noreen Alexander Manzella found a way. They describe it in the third article of the amazing June issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

Stage one -- logically, not chronologically! -- was elimination. Census, cemetery, and church records helped eliminate two of the three brothers. They also distinguish young William from a same-name first cousin five years older.

Reasoning by elimination can be a good start, but by itself it's not terribly convincing. In stage two, the authors found affirmative evidence connection young Jacob and William to the third brother, Nicholas Northamer.

Tax records showed that the young men were of the right ages, lived in the same township as Nicholas, and moved together. Even better, the same records also showed that the young men worked in the same trade as Nicholas, again unlike Nicholas's two brothers. (Woven into the logic of discovery are hints at some colorful and tragic family stories, which hopefully will see the light elsewhere.)

None of these records comes right out and names Nicholas as the father. This brick wall was felled by a weaving of gossamer threads of evidence, no one of which by itself looks like a match for a brick. But together . . .



Cathi Becker Wiest Desmarais and Noreen Alexander Manzella, "Who Fathered Jacob and William Northamer? Pennsylvania Tax Records Help Determine Kinship," National Genealogical Society Quarterly vol. 100, no. 2 (June 2012):123-32.

Harold Henderson, "Three Brothers Northamer: More NGSQ Genealogy Olympics," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Indiana Nurses, Coach Wooden, and the Underground Railroad

The Spring/Summer issue of The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections has a wide variety of articles for Indiana-minded researchers and maybe even non-researchers.

Three Morgan County experts present the first installment of a series on the family and early life of legendary basketball coach John Wooden (1910-2010), based on new documents, and correcting some previous reports.

Editor M. Teresa Baer gives a list of the records indexed and abstracted by the late Jane Eaglesfield Darlington (1928-2012). You may have seen her name while wandering the library. I've benefited most from her transcriptions of local tax records, but I had no idea that she had produced at least one year for 17 different counties: Fayette (1842), Greene (1843), Harrison (1844), Dearborn (1842), part of Franklin (1822), Marion (1842), Marshall (1843), Morgan (1840), Noble (1847), Perry (1824-1826, 1828-1829, 1832, 1835-1837, 1840-1843, 1845), Posey (1842), Scott (1839), Spencer (1846), Switzerland (1843), Tippecanoe (1848), Vigo (1828), and Whitley (1841).

In "Escaping Slavery," Jeannie Regan-Dinius has an easy-to-follow history of the Underground Railroad in Indiana, a history of the research on it, and a how-to guide on how to pursue the research. Court records are often critical.

Indiana State Archives volunteers Ruth May and Sandy Ricketts describe the on-line indexes at Indiana Digital Archives for several now-closed nurses training schools in Bloomington (1906-1946), Vincennes (1908-1959), South Bend (1907-1975), Indianapolis (1899-1932), Goshen (1909-1938), South Bend (1894-1988), Terre Haute (1900-1965), Evansville (1914-1955), and Indianapolis (1883-1980). The extracted data on line is a small fraction of what can be ordered from the archives provided that the records are 75 years old or more.

It would be interesting to be able to view and compare all the various state genealogy publications. After the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, this one has to stand near the top.


M. Teresa Baer, "Jane Eaglesfield Darlington: A Bibliography of Works by a Master Indexer of Hoosier Records,"The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012):4-5.

Curtis H. Tomak, Joanne Raetz Stuttgen, and Norma J. Tomak, "John Wooden: A Revised Beginning," Part 1, The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012):6-14.

Jeannie Regan-Dinius, "Escaping Slavery: Discovering Indiana's Underground Railroad Connections," The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012):15-25.

Ruth May and Sandy Ricketts, "Nurses' Records: The Indiana State Archives Houses Records for closed Indiana Nursing Schools and Indexes Them Online," The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections, vol. 52, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012):57-61.

Harold Henderson, "Indiana Nurses, Coach Wooden, and the Underground Railroad," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 13 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Ohio Genealogy News Summer 2010

Ohio Genealogy News can stand up to most states' top-line quarterlies. This quarter features the society's new library (grand opening outside Mansfield July 23) plus:

Tacy Arledge Lewis on "Ohio Tax Lists: Practical Applications" including where to find them;

news of Ohio vital records, including three indexes at FamilySearch Pilot website; and

news of Ohio newspaper digitizations from Logan, Mount Vernon, and Perrysburg.

You really do not want to be without this magazine if you're researching Ohio people.

Portage County Wisconsin obituaries and so much more

For many archival purposes, the Wisconsin Historical Society has divided the state into 14 Area Research Centers (ARCs), where a surprising variety of records that you might only otherwise find in courthouses reside, including vital, tax, school, property, probate, cemetery, business, and other record types. Check out this overall map and pick your spot -- every center operates a little differently. If your main interest is pre-1907 vital records, there's a statewide index here.

The university library at Stevens Point appears to be especially active genealogically speaking. Among other things they maintain the Stevens Point Area Obituary Index, a collaboration between the university archives, the Portage County Public Library, and the Stevens Point Area Genealogical Society. If you find a research target therein you can request a copy ($10 for up to 5 requests, but be sure to read their terms of service carefully -- clearly they have to deal with a lot of clueless people and you don't want to be one of them). The index is said to cover the following newspapers and date ranges: Stevens Point Weekly Journal 1872-1920, Stevens Point Daily Journal 1895-1980, Stevens Point Journal 1981-, Gazette 1878-1923, Portage County Gazette 1999-, and Wisconsin Pinery 1864-1890.

BTW, after I wrote this post I received the new issue of the always excellent NGS Magazine, which contains a meaty, detailed account of Wisconsin's ARCs by native son and veteran researcher David McDonald, CG. Check it out!

The Source Nobody Knows

If you have a research target in Indiana during the Civil War years, and they weren't poor, the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library's Heritage Center has a source for you: the 42-reel microfilm set Indiana Internal Revenue Lists for the years 1862-1866. Yes, Virginia, there was an income tax during the Civil War (that was back when they paid for wars themselves instead of laying off the bill on future generations). I've worked with these lists a tiny bit at the Great Lakes branch of the National Archives in Chicago, and they are real records -- that is, not organized or indexed for our convenience. You need to know where your folks were and where various towns were, in order to figure out the geographical layout of the districts used. And those with little or nothing won't show up here -- it's not a census substitute.

Tax lists -- a beginning

Thanks to Randy Seaver for highlighting Gena's Genealogy post with a partial list of tax records available on line. It's a good day if you have taxpaying research targets in Williamson County, Illinois, in 1891, or in Belmont County, Ohio, from 1811 to 1816!

Hmm -- looks like it will be some little while before this versatile source type is anywhere close to being well covered on line...

Early Ohio Tax Records redux

If you do lots of work in Ohio before 1820, you may want to take advantage of the reissuing of Esther Weygandt Powell's Early Ohio Tax Records, which offers partial census substitutes for the largely missing 1800 and 1810 enumerations in that state. Seventy-five counties are covered. Details on the new book are at this Terre Haute, Indiana, newspaper site (thanks to Genealogy Miscellanea for the pointer).

If you need to consult this reference only occasionally, be sure to check for it on WorldCat after entering your zip code. It looks to me like it is fairly well distributed (at least around the Midwest) in mid-size libraries as well as the major genealogical ones -- you may live within driving distance of a copy!

Civil War Income Tax

Regardless of your politics, wars and revenue-hungry governments are the genealogists' friends, because they create records. Juliana Smith at 24-7 Family History Circle offers some good tips on searching Ancestry.com's new database from National Archives material, U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862-1918 -- essentially nationwide tax lists by state and district. I know a lot of folks have issues with Ancestry, but this is real help, much more than a puff piece for their index work.

Yeah, just when you got the idea of checking every relative born between 1820 and 1850 for Civil War service, now you can check every relative alive 1862-1866 for their tax records! Bear in mind that these returns were of public interest back then too -- I happened on some lists published in the Licking County, Ohio, newspaper, the Newark Advocate.

Connections: The Hoosier Genealogist

Now a snazzy semiannual, the fall/winter issue of Connections: The Hoosier Genealogist is published by the Indiana Historical Society. Accordingly it often reads a bit like a genealogy magazine turned inside out: instead of authors struggling to find evidence about their ancestors, the authors here are writing about whoever is already in the IHS archives and collections. Sometimes this allows them to tell a crackerjack story.

The genealogically juicy part is that the print magazine's companion, Online Connections, which has indexes associated with some of the articles: for instance, the list of Grant County dentist Charles Priest's patients, and a three-part index of people mentioned in Lucius Keaton's diphtheria diary, with identifying information when available.

"Our Fathers' Stories: The world War II Oral History Collection at the Indiana Historical Society," by Elizabeth Flynn

"Earning Credentials: Genealogical Certification and Standards for Quality," by Elizabeth Shown Mills

"Early Dental Practices: Charles A. Priest's Dentist Accounts, Grant County, 1920-1937," by Geneil Breeze

"Diphtheria Victim's Journal: The Diary of Lucius S. Keaton, Shelby County, 1864-1865," by Evan Gaughan

"Community News: Social Columns of the Rockport Democrat, Spencer County, 1907," by Ruth Dorrel and Evan Gaughan

"Just a Country Girl: Stories from an Early Twentieth Century Hoosier Farm Family, Part 3," by Martha Brennan

"Civil War Soldiers: Addendum to GAR Series, Covington, Indiana, Part 2," by Mary Blair Immel

"Ancestor Migrations: Hennon Siblings Move from Ohio to Indiana and Farther West, 1850s through 1870s," by Robert DeWeitt Hennon

"Inheritance Taxes: Indiana's Inheritance Tax Records at the Indiana State Archives," by Barbara F. Wood. These records cover 1913-1933, but don't get your hopes up -- all counties alphabetically before Marion have been lost.