Watchdog Wednesday with Randy Seaver

Most readers of this blog probably need no introduction to the endlessly prolific Geneablogger From the Lower Left-Hand Corner of the United States, but on Watchdog Wednesday I still want to call attention to Randy Seaver's good work on tracking the curious history of Footnote Pages. Since he writes faster than I can read, I'm not going to link to his every posting on these subjects. Track him yourself. You have been warned.

Good and bad genealogy news in Ohio

Second installment on the fall issue of the Ohio Genealogical Society's Ohio Genealogy News, which comes bearing both good news and bad:

* The Preble County District Library has scanned and indexed county marriage records 1808-1996 and various other historical records.

* Bowling Green State University's Center for Archival Collections includes manuscripts with online finding aids; local government records including hunting and fishing licenses, poll books, tax lists, and peddlers licenses, plus online indexes for Henry County 1853 plat books and Wood County probate estate case files 1820-1870; and online databases of Great Lakes vessels including photographs.

* OGS will sponsor its third annual writing contest (750-5000 words), accepting entries in January and February 2010. This is a great place to jump-start your genealogy writing career and get some critiques. If you're doing a lot of work in Ohio, you can submit up to two entries in each of four categories -- eight total.

Bad news: the Ohio Historical Society's archives and library will be open only on Thursdays during 2010 and the first quarter of 2011. Library hours will be reduced at the Hayes Presidential Center and at Columbus Metropolitan as well.

Methodology Monday with the Fall Ohio Genealogy News

The new issue of Ohio Genealogy News is so packed with information I need two blog posts to cover it. In the methodology department, we have:

* Cross-check Your Sources: Dan Reigle, co-editor of the Ohio Civil War Genealogy Journal, amplifies on an earlier article about the Veterans Grave Registration cards, showing how the cards are valuable sources but they do contain errors, and need to be cross-checked against other military records, "as with any thorough genealogical study," using the example of Garnett B. Adrain. More likely his name was Adrian, and he served not one but two separate hitches in the Civil War.

* Know Your History: Neil H. Elvick describes land and property research in Gallia County, which has two different sets of original land records, from the Ohio Company in the east, and from the US government in the western half.

* When Indexes Fail: Marianne Szabo describes how browsing the Cuyahoga County Birth Returns at Footnote.com enabled her to find a Booms relative. Searching alone had failed, because the data was indexed under the name Boomer.

Bookends Friday: Insanity and genealogy

Anyone who's crazy enough to get into indexing and abstracting records of 19th-century insanity commitments should spend an evening or two with a little book from Indiana: From Under the Cloud at Seven Steeples, 1878-1885: The Peculiarly Saddened Life of Anna Agnew at the Indiana Hospital for the Insane (Zionsville: Guild Press/Emmis Publishing, LP, 2002), by Lucy Jane King, M.D. Anna Agnew, evidently a sufferer from what we would now call bipolar disorder, spent seven years on the inside, and lived to get well and tell about it -- but she never got her seven years, or her family, back. King quotes extensively from Agnew's own book and explains the situations. (Her attempts to bring the mental-health story down to the present are less successful, in my opinion. Oliver Sacks has another perspective in a recent New York Review of Books ($).)

It's a unique and essential view of a group that had a rough time in that century. The huge asylum buildings that survive look like grim antiquated warehouses to us now, but warehousing was not what the medical people of the 1800s had in mind. They built asylums on the theory that people became insane because the world was too fast-moving and confusing for them; hence the attempt to create an atmosphere of serene regularity and beauty for the inmates. Of course, not everyone who worked there understood or appreciated that philosophy.

September's Indiana Genealogist

"The Indenture of Harriett 'Hattie' Moss Dunihoo," by Randi Richardson.

"Juror Lists, Marion County, 1835," submitted by Ron Darrah from "numerous Marion County Circuit Court materials processed recently by volunteers at the Indiana State Archives."

[continued] "New History of the 99th Indiana Infantry," submitted by Meredith Thompson.

"Lake County Jurors, 1837," submitted by Marlene Polster.

"In-Genious: Finding Luther Martin's Grandfather: Valuable Clues in Newspaper Article," by Annette Harper. Census entries and newspaper articles make the case that he was George Martin; "land transfers were not searched, but might reveal a transfer to Nelson from his father."

Deal with it: the 20th century is history

One way to make sure you have blog fodder is to transcribe and annotate a diary or series of letters. That's being done quite a bit, and I just learned of a quintessentially Midwestern version being done by Sherry Jones of Michigan. "Leaves on the Trudgian Tree" follows the diaries oft her 20th-century relative Lillian Trudgian of rural Galena, Jo Daviess County, in the extreme upper-left-hand corner of Illinois. In recent episodes the family cans catsup by the quart, spends an entire morning doing laundry, goes shopping in Dubuque, and picks up "crabs" at a neighbor's. (Crabapples, that is.) Lillian's 1913-1931 diaries require more annotation than you might think!

It's fun to read the entries, but there's also a genealogical reason to do so, unless your farm people from a century or so ago also kept extensive diaries. You'll want to bookmark this as a reference for your "context file" when writing the family history.

BTW, the surname is from Cornwall.

A law professor treads close to genealogy

Tanya Marsh did some research on the close-up history of Indianapolis's Brightwood neighborhood, using Sanborn maps and other resources. Read more at PropertyProf Blog. Hat tip to Legal History Blog.