Tombstone Thursday in Lenawee County, Michigan

The Crazy Cemetery Ladies of Lenawee County have posted readings of at least some cemeteries in five townships of this SE Michigan county: Adrian, Fairfield, Madison, Ogden, and Palmyra. Be sure to check all the tabs on each page; despite the unorthodox web design a lot of real-world work has gone into this.

Fair warning: Not all pages have all links to the others, and the promising-looking links to Fairfield morticians and to their "dump" page don't work for me. But if you live half the country away and have people buried in one of these cemeteries, you won't mind.

Chicago newspapers history and whereabouts: 4 online sources

The most authoritative source for Chicago newspapers has to be the Illinois Newspaper Project, which lists 1394 titles, and enumerates, for each, which libraries are known to have them.

INP doesn't give a family tree of newspapers or a good sense of which ones existed when. The Encyclopedia of Chicago has three nice timelines of selected Chicago dailies, selected Chicago foreign-language dailies, and selected suburban papers, including mergers and disappearances.

Wikipedia also offers a list.

Most readable but least satisfactory is Chicagology's "family tree" of papers, which names only 39.

None of these sources is without errors of omission or commission, but Chicagology's linked account of the Chicago Times (written many decades ago but unattributed) is terribly incomplete.

Digital Book Index

Do you need more books than you can afford? Check out the Digital Book Index. I like to browse by subject (even though some headings are idiosyncratic), but it's all good. (Hat tip to Kathleen Lenerz on the APG Rootsweb mailing list.)

Under the subject heading "Local-Regional: Mid-West: Wisconsin," four pages of books are listed (in small font) including the 1889 Plat Book of Outagamie County Wisconsin (via the University of Wisconsin), Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie's 1873 Wau-Bun: The Early Day in the North-West, (via the Library of Congress), and Albert Hart Sanford's 1908 The Polish People of Portage County (via Harvard).

Under the subject heading "Economic Hist: City Business & Commercial Directories," you can find city directories from Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, and Steubenville, as well as quite a few from Pittsburgh and Hannibal (not necessarily listed together, however -- you have to do some work!).

All online. Almost all free. You may go down and not surface for a week or two, but it'll be worth it.

Methodology Monday in Evansville, Indiana

Tom Jones says we should spend as much time trying to figure out what to do with our sources as we spend finding them in the first place. I agree, while noticing with some embarrassment that almost every post to this blog has been about finding sources, not what to do with them afterwards.

I'll try to spend at least one post a week on interesting examples of methodology in tough cases. They may not all be from the Midwest but this one is. And since I won't unravel every detail of the reasoning, hopefully you'll be inspired to consult the original.

The semiannual Genealogist is perhaps the least well-known of the three or four top-ranked genealogy periodicals. I'm sure Fall 2007 is not its current issue, but it's the most recent one indexed in PERSI. Lead article is a 40-page monster by Stephen Alden Ralls, "The Lost Second Family of Colonel Hugh McGary Jr., Founder of Evansville, Indiana."

Polly (Blevins) McClain McGary had three McGary children in the early 1820s in Indiana. Everyone agrees Hugh McGary was the father, but which one? Hugh McGary Jr. of Evansville, Vanderburgh County, Indiana? His nephew Hugh McGary of Sangamon County, Illinois? Or his other nephew Hugh McGary of Arkasas and Missouri? And for that matter, who was the Hugh McGary who married Polly McClain in Vanderburgh County 7 September 1826...after two of those three McGary children were born?

The nephews had been favored because a fairly reliable 1889 county mug book from Arkansas identified this Huge as one who had served in the Black Hawk War -- both nephews had done so, but their uncle Hugh Jr. hadn't. But one nephew stayed in Sangamon County and his probate mentions children of two other marriages but none of these three. And the other nephew was only 13 at the time of the first McGary child's birth.

So Ralls pieces together a mosaic of evidence that makes the case that Hugh Jr. and Polly had two children born prior to this marriage and a third born after, at least one of these while they were both married to other people. Both were tried separately for adultery in the local court in 1825 (specifics not available) and not convicted. After that episode and one day after her divorce from her first husband, who had been elsewhere for some years, they took out a marriage license.

Ralls analyzes the evidence in the form of five arguments that Polly's first husband McClain was the father of the three children, and ten rather stronger arguments that Hugh Jr. was. He sniffs out a coverup from the very fact that Hugh and Polly's marriage is mentioned in no local history until the year 2000: "Since a marriage is a significant life event, since Hugh had been a very important person, since histories typically document important events of important people, and since this marriage is the last definite record of Hugh's presence in Vanderburgh County before disappearing, then it seems clear that its absence reflects an intent to conceal." (page 159) IOW, Hugh was a good ole boy and the other good ole boys protected him as much as they could.

For a masterful marshaling of indirect evidence to reach a conclusion that no record states in so many words, this story is hard to beat, even with the gaps and uncertainties, and the lack of a letter or other window into the minds of the participants. The genealogical summary traces 24 "new" grandchildren in Hugh Jr.'s descendant lines.

Ralls, Stephen Alden. "The Lost Second Family of Colonel Hugh McGary Jr., Founder of Evansville, Indiana." The Genealogist 21(2): 131-171.

NE Wisconsin history

One of the pleasures of attending Wisconsin's well-planned Gene-A-Rama earlier this month was getting acquainted with Voyageur, "Northeast Wisconsin's Historical Review," in the vendors' hall. It's based in Green Bay, so anything in that general area seems to be fair game.

I picked up the Summer/Fall 2008 issue (which was in the future the last time their web site was updated) and have been reading my way through stories about the Green Bay Packers' abortive post-WW2 out-of-town training camp; "the day [a piece of] Sputnik [IV] fell on [a street in] Manitowoc"; the story of "Baby Doe," a frontier Colorado beauty from Oshkosh; the history of Green Bay's small public squares; Sheboygan's grand old ballpark; and stories from the Wisconsin Oneidas, who were involved in the only WPA project with a linguistic focus and that employed Native American researchers.

Not a genealogy magazine, but if you have people anywhere in the upper right-hand corner of Wisconsin this is a great way to soak up their history.

A new motto for the Great Lakes Region National Archives

No doubt about it, the National Archives are intimidating. And it's not the kind of place to wander in and ask, "Whaddaya got?" But when you're ready with specific questions, you can start with the Great Lakes Region in Chicago. Call first and talk to an archivist.

What can you find there? Absolutely anything, and not necessarily where you expect. The National Archives' official motto is "What Is Past Is Prologue," but a case could be made for changing it to "Who Woulda Thunk It?"

An article in the Great Lakes Region's February 2009 monthly newsletter (not yet on line) describes the paper trail created when the federal government sold off its holdings on Grosse Isle in the Detroit River after World War II and hired a title company to do a search. That file included a photocopy of a 6 July 1776 treaty or deed to Alexander and William Macomb and signed by several Potawatomi chiefs:

Chief Magina's seal is an upside down deer and Chief Nanakota's seal is a fish with a very distinctive crosshatch pattern. The final pictograph, a tent, is that of Wabateathaque; his is the largest and closest to the signatures of the English.

Not just amazing, but conceivably of genealogical use if you need to confirm an 18th-century Native American identity by matching signatures. The citation is Grosse Ile Naval Air Station - Real Property Disposal Case Files. Records of the Chicago Regional Office. Accession RG 291-75A-0238-Box 25 Folder 15. Records of the Federal Property Resources Service. Record Group 291. National Archives-Great Lakes Region (Chicago).

A helping hand from north of the border

Anyone who's working in Wisconsin and Michigan knows how often Canadians pop up and need to be traced back across the border. I'm not going to pretend to any expertise whatever, just thank the Resource Shelf for including a pointer to Library and Archives Canada and its selection of online genealogical databases, some of them including original images. Resources include censuses, marriage and divorce records, as well as immigration and naturalization, land, military, and directory records.