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?

Barberton Births and Deaths 1938 forward

A link on the Akron-Summit County Public Library website led me to this online index of relatively recent vital events in Barberton, just southwest of Akron in Summit County, Ohio. It's a work in progress of the Barberton Health District (includes Norton) with records being entered monthly, and eventually to be entered back to 1909. (Although at one point the database is said to cover only up to 2001, I found an entry for 2003.)

Separate search engines for births and deaths work similarly. The main engine works only if you enter first name, last name, and full event date. You can select a secondary engine that will produce all results for a given surname. Otherwise, no browsing, but this is still a partial local substitute for censuses not yet available. Search results may include both parents' full names. You can crown a successful search by ordering an official (certified) birth or death certificate for $27 through VitalChek.

The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia

This year a kind and generous Santa brought me The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia, an 1891-page behemoth edited by Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton. (Cayton, as faithful readers of this blog already know, wrote the wonderful Frontier Indiana.) Their "Midwest" is more inclusive than this blog's: besides Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, it includes Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and both Dakotas.

The encyclopedia's 22 chapters each contain many individual articles by expert authors with additional reading suggestions. They run from geography to small-town life to military affairs, but its index has no entry for "genealogy." It's all relevant, of course, but of particular interest to genealogists may be "Cultural Geography" (p. 145), "Peoples" (p. 177), "Language" (p. 278), and the brief sketch of "State and Local Historical Societies" (p. 654). As a fan of Cayton's "General Overview" (p. xix), I'll give him the floor:

The conquest, settlement, and development of what we call the Midwest is one of the most important events in the past quarter millennium of human history. In the nineteenth century, millions of people entered this interior region, forcibly displaced thousands of American Indians, and established a society that dominated North America and much of the globe throughout the twentieth century. This breathtaking transformation amounts to one of the most all-encompassing and significant revolutions in the history of the world. ...

The Midwest in fact is not the land of the bland, but a collection of disparate communities held together, more or less, by a civic culture that transcends (or at least ignores) differences...

Read the whole thing.

Akron City Directories 1859-1969!

The Akron-Summit County Public Library Special Collections has done several wonderful things in digitizing Akron city directories. The most wonderful thing is that they did it at all, making this great research tool available to those who no longer live conveniently in northeast Ohio. But that's not all the goodness by any means. Let me count the ways:

First, they did them all or almost all (1911 and 1916 are still on the way), not skipping or selecting years. (The earliest is a partial edition from 1859; the latest is 1969. In between they have most years including a complete run 1877-1910.) Yearly coverage is critical for researchers just as it was for contemporaries. It enables us to confirm family members' presence, location, and occupation; even if they don't move (and most people rented and moved almost every year), their occupation may change or be described differently or include the employer's name. Unlikely-looking listings can be double-checked and perhaps confirmed in adjacent years. Family linkages may be suggested if people circulate through the same addresses in different years.

Second, they put each one in PDF format, making it easy to browse from one page to the next just as if browsing the physical book -- unlike Footnote's city directories, which often interleave two or three directories from the same year (with several "page 35" entries in a row), and sort the unnumbered pages strangely.

Third, they made them every-word-searchable with OCR (subject to the limitations of faded pages and worn type), so that the diligent researcher can pursue neighbors by searching on street names and numbers even in the absence of a criss-cross directory.

This is the best online city directory collection I've seen yet -- if you have nominees from elsewhere I'd love to see 'em. I'll be burrowing into my database, hoping to find some research targets who lived in or near Akron. (Hat tip to Kelly Holderbaum for pointing it out!)

Merry Christmas and Genealogy Reference To You

This may be superfluous if y'all already read Dick Eastman's newsy blog/newsletter. Jack Simpson, the curator of local family history at the Newberry Library, has started a blog to update his recently published book Basics of Genealogy Reference: A Librarian's Guide. As I blogged in October, it's aimed at librarians but quite possibly of interest to serious genealogists as well.

Michigan Genealogist, 4th issue of 2008

From the Michigan Department of History, Arts, and Libraries comes the state's closest thing to a statewide genealogy publication, Michigan Genealogist #4 (PDF) for 2008:

There's advance notice of six Saturday-afternoon sessions 4 April 2009 called "Learning More at the Library of Michigan," specific topics to be announced in February. Free but registration required due to limited seating. ... Be aware that many residents of northern Indiana and northwest Ohio may be closer to Lansing than to their own state capitals! Based on a flying visit last month, the Library of Michigan is the easiest state library to reach by car that I've ever seen (getting out of town is a little trickier) and it looks like a wonderful place to work.

The library is getting microfilm sets of city directories 1936-1960, which is big news if you're a devotee or someone who's pining away waiting for the 1940 census to be made public in 2012. LOM now has these for Toledo, Columbus, Indianapolis, and eight smaller Indiana cities.

And a Christmas Eve present for those with Michigan medical ancestors: special collections librarian Gloriane Peck lists a number of biographical books on hand that cover public health nurses, Jewish physicians, black medical graduates of the U of M, and women physicians, plus two directories from 1885 and 1893. Check out this useful set of descriptions, even if you have to search for them closer to hand.

Online resources at both ends of Indiana

In northern Indiana:

In Elkhart County, the Wakarusa Public Library Historical Room has a few photographs, maps, books, and articles on line, plus a goodly number of obituaries including full transcribed text from local newspapers. (I can't tell how many are indexed, but just two of them have birthdates before 1800.) The other items are browseable as well as searchable, the obituaries are only searchable. We all buzz right over to the obituaries, but if you have research targets there don't forget to check out the three plat maps of land ownership in Olive Township (the east half of congressional township 36 North range 4 East of the 2nd principal meridian) for 1874, 1892, and 1915.

Just a few miles south of Wakarusa near the Kosciusko county line, the Nappanee Public Library’s Evelyn Lehman Culp Heritage Center Collection has a similarly searchable set of obituaries.

In southern Indiana:

In Washington County (northwest of Louisville KY), Salem's Crown Hill Cemetery was founded in 1824. The city of Salem has its history and records on line, complete with a location map within the cemetery. (Two burials from 1824 are recorded.) This is the way on line cemeteries should be. The history refers to a cholera epidemic in 1833, and you can confirm that by searching for burials by date: six in 1832, 47 in 1833, eight in 1834. The site also links to the Washington County Historical Society's John Hay Center, with a genealogical library. (Hay was born here and is best known for being Abraham Lincoln's personal secretary.)

(Another hat tip to Valerie Beaudrault of the New England Historic Genealogical Society's eNews for spotting the above resources.)

Also in virtual southern Indiana, right on the Ohio River, the Vanderburgh County genweb site has a new look and includes links to the Willard Library in Evansville and to the famous Browning obituary collection.