What is pioneering, really?

Utne Reader points to Eula Biss's precise, thoughtful reflections on urban "pioneering" in Chicago's northeasternmost neighborhood, Rogers Park.

The word pioneer betrays a disturbing willingness to repeat the worst mistake of the pioneers of the American West [including today's Midwest] — the mistake of considering an inhabited place uninhabited. To imagine oneself as a pioneer in a place as densely populated as Chicago is either to deny the existence of your neighbors or to cast them as natives who must be displaced. Either way, it is a hostile fantasy.

Her reflections are coupled with reflections on those earlier pioneers, as presented by Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose children's books don't duck away from confronting the racism ("The only good Indian is a dead Indian") that dominated her childhood environment.

Victoria Freeman's book Distant Relations: How My Ancestors Colonized North America is longer, a bit less nuanced, and focused more on New England, but makes some of the same points explicitly in the context of her ancestors, including interpreter-general Thomas Stanton and John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians. This is genealogy concerned with understanding the past, not glorifying it.

Northeastern Ohio heritage online

Diane Haddad at Genealogy Insider mentions Ohio's Heritage Northeast as a favorite website, and I can see why.

OHN combines into a single searchable database archival collections from Cleveland State University (the hosting institution), Akron-Summit County Public Library, Cleveland Public Library (a genealogical force in its own right, home of the excellent Cleveland Necrology File), Oberlin College Archives, Rodman Public Library (in Alliance), Westlake Porter Public Library, Cuyahoga County Public Library, Shaker Heights Public Library, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, and the Syracuse (New York) Public Library. (The last two institutions aren't in northeast Ohio, but they share relevant material.)

You can choose which of the several dozen collections to search: they run from Akron Banknotes (locally printed money from the Civil War era) to Yesterday's Lakewood, and include Cleveland postcards and ethnic groups including Blacks, Polish Americans, German Americans, Irish Americans, and Hungarian Americans. Most are collections of images but there is some text. Unfortunately, it's sometimes hard to tell from the collection title what you're going to get, and I haven't found a way to simply browse a collection.

Be prepared to spend some time here. I don't have a lot of folks in NE Ohio, and let's just say it's taken me quite a while to write this post!

More Illinois sources on line

Illinois Harvest is digitizing books from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign library faster than I can keep up with (check the tag cloud for previous posts). Recent additions of potential genealogical and microhistorical interest:

Portrait and Biographical Record of Macon County, Illinois. Chicago: Lake City Publishing Co., 1893. 736 pages on the city of Decatur and its immediate hinterland.

The Indian tribes of the Chicago region, with special reference to the Illinois and the Potawatomi, by William Duncan Strong. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1926.

A Visit to the Illinois Eastern Hospital. Chicago: H.O. Shepard, 190_. That's the mental institution better known as "Manteno," where a grandaunt of mine was later an inmate.

Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, including a Day by Day record of Sherman's March to the Sea, by Charles Wright Wills. Wills had a busy war, serving in the 8th Illinois Infantry, 7th Illinois Cavalry, and 103rd Illinois Infantry. Use this link to the American Libraries site; the others bring up a 404 Not Found error on my machine.

Chicago Daily News National Almanac for the years 1892-3, 1896, 1898-1905, 1909-9, 1911-17, and 1919-23.

Illinois State Gazetteer and Business Directory for the Years 1864-5, Embracing Descriptive Sketches of All the Cities, Towns and Villages Throughout the State... [well, you get the idea]. Chicago: J.C.W. Bailey, 1864. 846 pages. Downstate coverage is good, including even a brief mention of the still-unincorporated hamlet of Summum in SW Fulton County.

Two of Edwards' annual Chicago city directories, volume 12 for 1869-1870, and volume 14 for 1871.

Industrial Chicago, volumes 1-5. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1891-1894. Volumes cover "the building interests" (v1&2), "the manufacturing interests" (v3), "the commercial interests" (v4), and "the lumber interests" (v5).

Album of Genealogy and Biography, Cook County Illinois, for 1897, 1899, and 1900, although I'm not sure the later volumes add much to the first one. As in all such high Victorian productions, expect to find only the rich and well-known telling their own highly selective versions of the story. If you need George Pullman's take on the Pullman Strike, you can find it here in all its rigid, archaic glory.

The book of Chicagoans: A Biographical Dictionary of Leading Living Men and Women of the City of Chicago. Chicago: A.N. Marquis, 1905 and 1917.

Remember, these are digital images of the originals, totally searchable -- the gold standard AFAIK.

Invitation to some inquests

Thanks to my Pittsburgh friend (and 5th cousin once removed) Jan for pointing out a post by Lisa Alzo at The Accidental Genealogist. (It's blog "for genealogists who like to write, and writers who happen to be genealogists!" -- how did I miss that one?) Lisa writes about The University of Pittsburgh Archive Services Center's Coroner Case File Project, preserving and making available Allegheny County coroner's inquest files from 1887 to 1973.

She's hoping that one o f these files will shed light on a probable murder among her relatives, but from some of the comments in the accompanying wiki I wouldn't count on it. One browser of the files reports, "I think that some of my case files [more than 100 years ago] that were ruled suicides were actually misdiagnosed or just plain wrong. In one file a man was found in the Allegheny River, his feet bound and stab wounds in his chest. The coroner ruled it a suicide..." Moral: always evaluate official sources with a wary eye.

These files are an unusual source for unusual circumstances (or, perhaps, for historical background). Similar files covering shorter time spans are also available through the Illinois State Archives' regional depositories for the Illinois counties of Cook, DeWitt, Macoupin, Vermilion, and Wayne.

The Indiana genealogy portal to end all Indiana genealogy portals

Many thanks to the Indiana Genealogical Society blog for mentioning the remarkable collection of resources at Hoosier Heritage: Indiana History and Genealogy Online. This site goes far beyond the average and the obvious and includes such links as 19th Century Indiana Physicians, H-Indiana: H-Net Discussion Network for Indiana History, a clickable county-by-county map of Indiana Public Libraries, Genealogical, and Historical Societies, Civil War Indiana, and (inevitably) Cruise-IN.com: Celebrating Indiana Automotive History. If you can't find anything here for your Indiana research, you're in the wrong state.

Ohio Historical Society spring seminars

The Ohio Historical Society -- located north of downtown in Columbus in that exceedingly strange concrete building at the fairgrounds -- has an excellent educational lineup this spring. The full list of affordable no-motel ways to learn is at OHS's episodic blog. One of my favorite offerings, given that the survey map of Ohio looks like a crazy quilt:

GW18B
More Land Office Records in Ohio
May 15, 2008, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

This course will identify where public land offices were located in Ohio and describe what records kept at each office provide necessary information to determine who first purchased land, and when payments were made. Emphasis is on the description of land survey (field notes and measurements), entry, and payment records at the Ohio Historical Society and how to best use them.

If you're just going there to research, beware their drastically limited library hours and check here first. (Scroll way down.)

Military records can surprise

Darlene Shawn in the Norman [Oklahoma] Transcript says it better than I can:

Do not miss the opportunity to learn more about your ancestors by searching for their military papers. You never know what you may learn....

My ancestor Solomon L. Beaver (Bever) had remained in Ohio when he was discharged from the Union army and remarried without the benefit of divorcing his first wife who lived in Indiana with his five children. The pension papers were filled with affidavits from two women who were trying to get a pension based on Solomon's military service.

Unfortunately, my female ancestor, Mary Blair Bever had remarried before the death of Solomon so she was not entitled to a pension nor was his second unlawful wife. However, the five children by the first marriage did receive a pension from their father's service.

Someday all these papers will be digitized; meanwhile the price of ordering them recently doubled. They're still a genealogical bargain .