Bookends Friday: Orphan Trains

On the morning of October 1, 1854, forty-five children sat on the front benches of a meetinghouse in Dowagiac, Michigan. Most were between ten and twelve years old. . . For the last couple of weeks notices had been running in the newspapers, and bills had been posted at the general store, the tavern, and the railroad station asking families to take in homeless boys and girls from New York City. The children had arrived on the train from Detroit at three that morning and had huddled together on the station platform until sunup . . . .

If you have the slightest genealogical interest in orphans, half-orphans, or abandoned children, Stephen O'Connor's 2001 book Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed will keep your attention all the way through. The author manages to tell three intertwined tales: the life of Brace, a classic New England reformer; the stories (those that are recoverable) of many of the children themselves; and the way nineteenth-century Americans, including Brace's Children's Aid Society, thought about the problem of children without competent or affluent parents.

Because the big surprise here is that Brace's basic ideas have not been jettisoned at all. They are still at the heart of our foster care "system"; only the trains are missing. The past is not dead; it isn't even past.

Social Science Research Network? What?

Sometimes as a genealogist, you can feel like a dog underneath a banquet table -- so many of the succulent scraps of information are out of reach, requiring access to those few libraries that have access to JSTOR or NBER papers. But the Social Science Research Network has thousands of papers anyone can download for free (PDF). And some of them are even relevant to our work. Here are four titles I picked up in a few minutes of searching:

"'Social Equality Does Not Exist among Themsleves, nor among Us': Baylies vs. Curry and Civil Rights in Chicago, 1888," by Dale

"History in the Law Library: Using Legal Materials to Explore the Past and Find Lawyers, Felons, and Other Scoundrels in Your Family Tree," by Metzmeier (2008, Kentucky)

"Anglo-American Land Law: Diverging Developments from a Shared History. Part II: How Anglo-American Land Law Diverged after American Colonization and Independence," by Thomas (1999, BYU)

"'The Most Esteemed Act of My Life': Family, Property, Will, and Trust in the Antebellum South," by Davis and Brophy (2009) -- on antebellum probate practices in Greene County, Alabama -- a county that was both wealthy and unburnt.

I'm sure there's more. Arf!

Hat tip to this post from the Samford University Library's Institute of Genealogical and Historical Research on Facebook.

She fought the law, and sometimes won

H-Net has a very handy review of A. Cheree Carlson's new book from University of Illinois Press, The Crimes of Womanhood: Defining Femininity in a Court of Law. Carlson tells the stories of six prominent 19th- and early 20th-century cases involving women. Reviewer Tamar Carroll highlights the case of

Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard, a Presbyterian minister's wife who drew her husband's ire when she took up Swedenborgianism, a mystical philosophy "at odds with traditional Christianity," and tried to convert to Methodism, more amenable to her newfound spiritual beliefs (p. 24). Before she could do so, Rev. Packer had her confined in the "maniac" ward of the Illinois State Hospital, where she remained until the superintendent released her three years later . . . . Upon her release, her husband took away Packard's clothes and locked his unrepentant wife in the nursery of their house; she managed to slide a note out the window frame to a neighbor, who sought judicial intervention.

What happened next? Read the whole thing. Sometimes clever lawyers were able to use 19th-century notions about feminity to win their clients' freedom.

For those of us who graze the banquet table of history, the review usefully contrasts and compares other books and articles on the legal perils of 19th-century women.

Hat tip to Legal History Blog.

Chicago Genealogist Summer 2009

The new issue of Chicago Genealogist has several goodies:

"Thomas Hatton Gravestock," by Richard Gravestock -- a warts-and-all account of the author's grandfather, a high-living saddler who deserted the British army and emigrated to the US, where he ended up with a family in Boston and one in Chicago.

"Illinois Staats Zeitung -- Part III, June 1872," translated by Virginia Dick. This German-language newspaper covered more than just German news!

"The University of Chicago: Remembering a Time," by Raymond E. Johnson, a memoir of Roseland and the U of C, 1939-1942.

"Harrison Technical High School: 1941," tr. Thomas J. Draus. List of graduates.

Methodology Monday with Tony Burroughs

Chicago's own Tony Burroughs has a nice post at AC360. Much of it pertains to the stringent methodological requirements of doing African-American genealogy successfully, and one part should be required reading for all genealogists:

Many are unaware of the vast amount of records that exist, and the scarcity of those that are digitized or even catalogued. One institution alone, the National Archives, has only 125,000 scanned images on their website out of 4 billion documents in their collection. That’s one page for every 34,000 documents.

Very crudely put, your odds of finding what you're looking for on the internet alone: 33,999 to 1.

If you lost your job, would you chop up your garage for kindling wood?

I didn't think so. But that's approximately what the state of Michigan will do unless the legislature steps in -- try to save on the state budget by dismantling the Library of Michigan, said to be the tenth largest genealogical library in the US. If you live or work in Michigan, take a minute to visit the Western Michigan Genealogical Society and ponder what you can do. Anyone in NW Indiana want to share a drive to Lansing on August 5?

Bookends Friday: The Legacy of Conquest

"The past isn't dead -- it isn't even past." Faulkner could have been inscribing the moral of Patricia Nelson Limerick's 25-year-old survey, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. She does a rip-roarin' job of skewering the one-sided and inadequate history that most of us were taught in school and that too many genealogists rely on today.

Her main point is that we tend to divide the past into two compartments: the distant past of the frontier, and the recent past up to today. But these compartments make no sense; it's all one story, and it's still happening.

The American West was an important meeting ground, the point where Indian America, Latin America, Anglo-America, Afro-America, and Asia intersected. In race relations, the West could make the turn-of-the-century Northeastern urban confrontation between European immigrants and American nativists look like a family reunion. . . .

. . . the working of conquest tied these diverse groups into the same story. Happily or not, minorities and majorities occupied a common ground. Conquest basically involved the drawing of lines on a map, the definition and allocation of ownership, and the evolution of land from matter to property. The process had two stages: the initial drawing of the lines (which we have usually called the frontier stage) and the subsequent giving of meaning and power to those lines, which is still underway. . . .

The contest for property and profit has been accompanied by a contest for cultural dominance. Conquest also involved a struggle over languages, cultures, and religions; the pursuit of legitimacy in property overlapped with the pursuit of legitimacy in way of life and point of view. In a variety of matters, but especially in the unsettled questions of Indian assimilation and in the disputes over bilingualism and immigration in the still semi-Hispanic Southwest, this contest for cultural dominance remains a primary unresolved issue of conquest. {27}

Many of these points apply equally to the Midwest and other earlier-settled parts of the country, but they stand out more in the West because its history is closer in time and has been ardently fictionalized by Hollywood and pulp authors.

Another way to put it is that real history pays attention to more than just one point of view. Much of the old history paid little attention to those who weren't guys and who weren't white. But those people are ancestors too.