On down the trail

Did your research targets move right on to Missouri? Or Alaska? (Hey, they're both west of here!)
Or did they stay put northwest of Chicago, say, in Mt. Prospect? Then check out the linked resources, all courtesy of the ever-vigilant New England Historic & Genealogical Society's eNews (click on a particular issue in the up-to-date archive for a signup link). The Missouri papers, part of an impressive online state presence, are fairly scattered; the Alaska index is mostly to headlines. Enjoy!

Your ancestor's been working on the railroad

Craig Pfannkuche, of the McHenry County and Chicago genealogical societies, and of the Chicago & Northwestern History Society, made a strong case at last week's Illinois State Genealogical Society conference for genealogists to pay a lot more attention to railroad records.

How come? At least four reasons: the railroads were the largest single industrial employer in the US in the 19th century; they were record-intensive operations, having to run widely scattered operations consistently and efficiently; they were labor-intensive operations, and needed to hire people of almost all trades, and none; and many of their records have been lovingly preserved by both general-purpose archives and by history societies like the CNWHS. If the listing linked above doesn't make you drool, check your pulse.

Better yet, Pfannkuche, as genealogical chairman of this latter group, will respond at no charge to requests for lookups -- if you have a reasonable idea of the time, place, and railroad your people may have been involved with. Given that tiny hamlets with no visible rail presence today were often thriving centers of activity a century or more ago, that requirement may not be as hard to fulfill as you think.

Genealogy is everywhere

Cynthia doesn't post real often at ChicagoGenealogy, but when she does you can be sure it's a good one. Yesterday guest blogger Barbara offered a finding aid under the title, "Adoption Research: Using the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin to Find Birth Names." Check it out -- it looks like it will be more useful the closer you know the date.

During my years of actual employment on the near north side, I often saw bundles of the latest CDLB being wheeled hither and yon on the sidewalks, and occasionally browsed an issue. It never dawned on me what a useful resource it might be for adoption and other Chicago legal matters relating to genealogy. Do you have an item in your past, long taken for granted, that might be as useful as this one?

OGS Quarterly for fall

Three families are featured in articles in the fall 2009 Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly:

"Newstedt Family -- Syke, Hannover, Germany to Cincinnati, Ohio," by Charles Knighton -- a true story about three teenage immigrant brothers.

"The Legacy of Lewis Seitz, Ohio Pioneer," by Karl Seitz. Lewis was involved in a migration from Rockingham County, Virginia, to Fairfield County, Ohio, based on his church's strong disapproval of slavery and their determination to have no "communion or visible fellowship" with slaveholders.

"The Mystery of Abraham Tope," by Eric E. Johnson, a War of 1812 soldier from Jefferson County who supposedly died in the war, but apparently didn't. The mystery is clarified but not fully solved -- will more records do the trick?

Methodology Monday with three census names for one person

You think the census is wrong? Way wrong? Read this article to get an idea of what you may need to do to prove it.

Midwesterners are the main fare in "Untangling Intertwined Branches: Caroline McNeill and Caroline Spencer in Lee County and Marion County, Iowa," by Marieta A. Grissom, CG, in the September 2009 National Genealogical Society Quarterly. She proves that 7-year-old Caroline McNeil in 1850, 12-year-old Issabelle Spencer in 1856, and 18-year-old Caroline Spencer in 1860, all in Warren and Nancy McNeil's household, are the same person...who was not a child of the McNeils. The journey involves censuses, vital records, probate records, and more in several counties and three states.

Not black and white

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writing in The Root after the discovery of Michele Obama's white ancestor:

the social categories of “white” and “black” are and always have been more porous than can be imagined, especially in that nether world called slavery.

As I have learned since embarking upon my African American Lives series (for PBS), never before are more African Americans determined to ferret out the names of their slave ancestors, and never before have more resources, especially online, been available to facilitate these searches. But, be prepared. To paraphrase the Bible: seek; but fasten your seat belt as to what ye may find.

Specifically, only 5 percent of African-Americans can claim at least one Native American great-grandparent; but 58 percent can claim at least one white great-grandparent (or the equivalent thereof). The past is what it is, not what we may wish it was.

Not 100%

The ProGenealogists blog did a very nice thing in getting permission from author William B. Saxbe, Jr., to reprint his article from the March 1999 National Genealogical Society Quarterly, "Nineteenth-Century Death Records: How Dependable Are They?"

Read the whole thing, but basically Saxbe carefully compared three different records of deaths in Champaign County, Ohio, between 1 June 1879 and 31 May 1880: a county death register, the US census mortality schedule for the county, and obituaries published in the three county-seat newspapers. Conclusion: "No more than 35 percent of the known deaths produced obituaries, only 56 percent appeared in the county death registrations, and only 84 percent were picked up by that year’s mortality census." And almost half of the known deaths appeared in only one of the three sources.