Waukegan's Sesquicentennial?

Evidently this is going to be Catching Up With Fellow Midwestern Bloggers week. Diana Dretske at the Lake County (Illinois) Museum and Archives posted on Lake County seat Waukegan's 150th anniversary as a city. Of course its actual age as an identifiable place goes back at least to 1695. Her Illuminating Lake County, Illinois History blog is consistently festooned with wonderful images from that history.

KBB on the 1947 Centralia coal mine disaster

Kathy Brady-Blake, CG, of the Chicago area, has been posting this past week about the massive Centralia (Marion County, Illinois) coal mine disaster of 25 March 1947 at Kathy's Genealogy Blog. One of the 111 miners killed that day in the underground mine was her grandfather Anton Skrobul.

The genealogical afterlife of Sangamon County, Illinois

If you have research targets in central Illinois' Sangamon County (county seat Springfield), you can't have been pleased by that genealogical society's decision in December to disband due to loss of membership. Fortunately their archives and publications have been inherited by the Decatur Genealogical Society of nearby Macon County. DGS's March-April newsletter reports that SGS's former president Dan Dixon was instrumental in making the transition. The 81 publications are available for sale here. The Decatur society maintains its own genealogical library, opened three days a week by volunteers, and said to be "one of the largest private genealogical libraries in downstate Illinois."

Hat tip to Jeanne Larzalere Bloom.

Genealogy TV in parts of the Midwest

Dick Eastman says "Legend Seekers" is a good show -- TV watchers in much of southern and central Illinois, and Indianapolis and Bloomington, Indiana, will get to see for themselves as early as tonight.

Common-Place the online history magazine

Check out the January issue of Common-Place for background and even some methods. Not much directly pertaining to the Midwest in this issue, but Christopher Grasso gives a lengthy preview of his book on how belief and unbelief wove together in the US in the early 1800s. If you want hard-core research, click on Eastern Illinois University professor Charles R. Foy's article, "Uncovering Hidden Lives," whose work in archives on both sides of the pond has helped produce the Colored Mariner Database (not yet on line) of almost 10,000 African American, Native American, or mixed-race Atlantic mariners in the 1700s. For instance:

A compilation of naval records had provided me with the story of four slave sailors on a ship from St. Thomas who found themselves in Portsmouth during the American Revolution due to a broken ship rudder. The seamen convinced naval officials of their rights under the English law not to be forced to continue to work as slaves on the ship. The case was particularly interesting because it involved slave sailors from throughout the Atlantic: North America, the British West Indies, Calabar, and St. Thomas. But what happened to these men once they left the ship in Portsmouth was unknown. A review of court, tax, land, and church records in the Portsmouth City Records Office provided no information on the men. However, a search of records for warships in Portsmouth at the time the men landed there yielded a significant discovery: one of the men had been subsequently impressed onto a naval ship! While we might not know the details of these men's lives after they gained their freedom, the fate of this unfortunate sailor reminds us that in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American maritime world, freedom from enslavement did not always mean freedom from coerced labor.

Surely this is where the always-permeable border between genealogy and history dissolves altogether.

Also don't miss Byron Le Beau's discussion of Currier & Ives's not terribly realistic but still informative visual record of the 19th century including the Civil War.

Wisconsin Legal History, anyone?

For references to books, and a large helping of short articles by Joseph A. Ranney, author of the most recent book (Trusting Nothing To Providence), check out Wisconsin Legal History at the Wisconsin state bar page. Nothing here to cut and paste into your Wisconsin family's genealogy, but lots of sources and ideas and background, from roistering circuit riders to angry farmers. Here's a snip from the latter -- read the whole thing:

Another Jacksonian feature of the Wisconsin Constitution was Article VIII, section 10, which prohibited the state from financing or supporting public improvements of any sort. Because state aid was not available, early railroads had to look to private investors and municipalities for the huge sums of capital they needed to build and operate their lines.¹² The Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad developed the device, copied by many other railroads, of issuing stock in return for municipal bonds or individual promissory notes that were secured by mortgages.¹³ A large portion of the notes and mortgages passed into the hands of eastern financiers.¹⁴

The depression of 1857 forced every railroad in Wisconsin into bankruptcy. Most farmers who had purchased railroad stock had relied on railroad dividends to pay their promissory notes; when the dividends dried up, the easterners who held the notes foreclosed on thousands of farms throughout Wisconsin. Farm mortgage leagues were formed to resist the foreclosure threat, and they became a force in state politics. Between 1857 and 1868 the Legislature passed a series of laws giving farm debtors various substantive and procedural defenses in foreclosure actions; however, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down all of the laws, in most cases because they impaired the obligation-of-contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution. Throughout the 1860s the leagues tried to defeat the supreme court justices at the polls and obtain a more sympathetic court, but they failed narrowly at each election.¹⁵

(Hat tip to Legal History Blog.)

Of Migrations and Swimming Pools: Book Reviews at H-Net Online

Two book reviews from social history spotlight books that can illuminate genealogy too:

Jeannette Keith reviews Jack S. Blocker's A Little More Freedom: African Americans Enter the Urban Midwest, 1860-1930. It's clear the book contains much detail on the northward migrations of African Americans, including case studies of their lives in Washington Court House (Fayette County), Ohio; Springfield (Clark County), Ohio; and Springfield (Sangamon County), Illinois. He also discusses lynchings and race riots. In the words of the reviewer, "In their reaction to antiblack collective violence, African Americans in the Midwest demonstrated that they did indeed have a little more freedom than they might have had in the South. Black newspapers crusaded against mob rule, as did black self-help groups ranging from Sunday school conferences to women's clubs. Most strikingly, African Americans armed themselves for collective self-defense." The review is detailed and the book promises more.

Christopher J. Manganiello reviews Jeff Wiltse's Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. Your immigrant ancestors may have played a role in getting municipal swimming pools started. The reviewer summarizes: "Boisterous and naked working-class boys and men bathed in Philadelphia, Boston, and Milwaukee rivers because urban tenement housing offered limited indoor facilities. When these bathers offended Gilded Age citizens’ Victorian sensibilities, reformers justified the establishment of bathing pools on public health arguments."