Is Arkansas in the Midwest?

Not hardly, but that's where I'll be this week so the blog will look a little different. At least I get to drive the full length of Illinois, Chicago to Cairo (is this a reward or a punishment?!), and hopefully bring you a different kind of blog take on the Association of Professional Genealogists gatherings (late Tuesday and Wednesday) and then the Federation of Genealogical Societies (Thursday-Saturday), all in downtown Little Rock, Arkansas -- more the mid-South than the Midwest in my regional book.

Bookends Friday: Was the Civil War more civil than we think?

Robert Citino has an interesting review of Mark Neely's 2007 on The Civil War and the Limits of Destruction on H-net. Read the whole thing, but here's the gist:

the American Civil War was not a particularly brutal one... Volunteer troops in the Mexican War, for example, routinely visited depredations on the local civilians that their counterparts in the later war would never have dreamed of doing. The guerrilla war in Missouri, which has become an obsession of present-day civil war historiography, is here cut down to size as one of a series of “sideshows” (p. 71) to the larger war; sure, generals were more likely to make hard war on guerrillas, but much of the fighting in Missouri (Price’s Raid, for example) was of the conventional, force-on-force variety. The civil war in Maximilian’s Mexico was far more brutal than anything witnessed in the U.S. Civil War, with tens of thousands of liberales killed by the imperial government, their bodies hung upside down to rot as a warning to others who were loyal to Juarez. Sheridan’s alleged “burning” of the Shenandoah Valley was actually a much more surgical operation than usually portrayed, destroying anything that the Confederate Army could use, but leaving civilian supplies, provisions, and dwellings untouched (which is why all the wheat was burned but almost none of the corn). ...Another awful event, the revelation of horrific abuses against Union prisoners at Andersonville, complete with photographs that still shock the viewer today--with Union prisoners looking for all the world like inmates at Dachau or Buchenwald--led to some loose talk among Northern legislators about deliberately starving, shooting, or working to death Confederate prisoners in the North. But again, this is precisely what did not happen. Cooler and wiser heads prevailed, especially President Lincoln’s, and none of these dreadful scenarios came to pass.

Did your ancestor keep quiet in study hall?

When in doubt, read everything. There's not usually a lot of genealogical meat in Midwestern newspapers as old as 1855, but you just never know.

C. B. Smith was teaching school in Sterling, Whiteside County, Illinois, that spring, and he told his students that he would publish in the local newspaper "the names of all those who would not whisper in study hours for ten weeks; also the names of those who should whisper but once, or twice, or three times during the same period." And he did, in a "Communication" to the editor of the Sterling Times and Whiteside County Advertiser, 29 March 1855, page 3, column 2 (microfilm via interlibrary loan from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library).

No school census for Whiteside County that year? No problem:

NOT AT ALL

John Aumont
Isaac Bryson
Marian Fassett
Catharine Price
Ellen Colder
Emma Wilson
Ruth Brink
Amos Miller
Alonzo Colder
Kate Wallace
Emma Colder [hmm, these names could be Golder]
Emily Worthington
Ann E. Wilson
Angie Stebbins
Sarah King

BUT ONCE
Jacob Bryson
Caroline Sackett
Josephine Worthington
Sarah Stebbins
J. G. Manahan
Mary Worthington
Frances Galt
Josephine Galt

BUT TWICE
William Penrose
Frances Fassett

BUT THREE TIMES

Robt Penrose

Concluded Smith, "The evil is in great measure eradicated."

Willard Calvin Heiss, Hall of Famer

If you're preparing a new edition of Genealogist Trading Cards, get ready to add a new member of the National Genealogy Hall of Fame, Indiana Quaker scholar Willard Calvin Heiss (1921-1988). You don't have to spend much time working in eastern Indiana to recognize the name; details in the current NGS Magazine.

Montgomery County Illinois on line in a big way

The Historical Society of Montgomery County's digital archive holds tons of information that would be even better with a bit more context:

* searchable index of 27,044 death certificates 1877-1950, with a link to the form for requesting actual copies from the County Clerk/Recorder.

* searchable index of 6,946 first land purchases, mid-1800s; helpful information on how to read these descriptions is at the Illinois State Archives' web site, from which at least some of the information appears to come.

* vintage photos, biographies, and historical tidbits for 17 towns from Butler to Witt.

* searchable list of 10,214 veterans with DD 214 discharge forms registered with the county clerk/recorder, going back to World War I.

* searchable index of 22,737 obituaries 1980-2008 from two local newspapers, as scrapbooked by society members.

* names and detailed location information for 125 cemeteries.

And that's just on the research tab! If you don't lose track of the time perusing this site, your ancestors sadly must not have passed this way.

Hat tip to Cyndi's List What's New.

Methodology Monday with the Otts

This month the Transitional Genealogists are reading and discussing T. Mark James's article, "Abraham Ott of Orangeburg, South Carolina: Direct vs. Indirect Evidence," published in the June 2005 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, a free download for NGS members. The article has many interesting aspects, of which two at least will stick with me:

* the author resides in New Zealand, but he didn't let that keep him from researching a 200-year-old South Carolina burned-county puzzle.

* the irritant that produced the pearl, in this case, was a list of intestates (people who died without wills) that included a name that shouldn't have been there -- a name that suggested there might after all have been two Abraham Otts alive in the same time and place. The moral (for me): don't duck or casually minimize those odd bits of data. In fact, seek them out. They may be trying to tell you something, and usually it's: Do More Research.

Bookends Friday: Mongrel Nation

Over at HNN (History News Network) there's an interesting review of Clarence Walker's new Mongrel Nation: The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (which book I have not seen although I admiringly devoured every word of Annette Gordon-Reed's masterful The Hemingses of Monticello). The review is by historian Jim Downs of Connecticut College. Here's the part that caught my attention as a genealogist:

historical narratives in the United States have both mythologized certain prominent actors from the past while simultaneously creating silences around those with less power. According to Walker, chroniclers of the American past have mythologized Thomas Jefferson, making it difficult for scholars like Gordon-Reed and others to actually present an image of Jefferson that does not glorify him. More to the point, Walker reveals how a number of historians, archivists, and writers that have been involved in preserving, documenting, and writing about the past have purposely ignored the topic of racial amalgamation, and instead have posited an image of the United States as a lily-white nation since its conception. While historians within the Academy have certainly refuted this interpretation, the mainstream public continues to embrace this vision of the American past—which, by the way, is only further buttressed by the popularity of bestselling history books and biographies on the “Founding Fathers.” Such interpretations of the past that lionize white men in power unwittingly (and sometimes purposely) eclipse the experiences of ordinary Americans whose alleged anonymous lives form the mere backdrop to the “master” narrative of American history.

So maybe good genealogical or microhistorical writing about ordinary people (like Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie or Mr. and Mrs. Prince and The Sea Captain's Wife) is the antidote to the endless parade of Founding Father books and the "great man" theory of history?