A different take on 19th-century law

On H-Net, Timothy S. Huebner reviews Laura F. Edwards's new book The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South,
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The book is based on micro-research in six counties in North and South Carolina. This passage from the review caught my attention, and it wouldn't surprise me if something similar were true in other regions, especially near the frontier:

Courts developed around magistrates in order to deal with more serious
offenses, but Edwards convincingly shows that in the final analysis
the people wielded considerable power within this system.  Possessing
a deep sense of their responsibility to the community, as well as a
basic understanding of local legal processes, men and women--whether
black or white, rich or poor--routinely brought complaints against
others for breaching the peace.  Such complaints empowered individuals
at the same time that they preserved existing hierarchy.  "Local
officials considered complaints on a case-by-case basis, righting
specific wrongs done to the metaphorical public body without extending
additional rights to any category of dependents," Edwards explains (p.
110).  Thus, local officials responding to complaints could "undercut
the domestic authority of one husband or one master" without making
any generalized rule that affected husbands or masters (p. 110).

I haven't met up with the book itself yet, but I hope to soon.

Got Van Buren County ancestors?

A nice set of 1906 township plat maps for Van Buren County, Michigan, is available on line through Michigan State University. If you're rusty on Michigan geography, Van Buren is the second county up Lake Michigan on the west side of the state, just north of Berrien (St. Joseph) and just west of Kalamazoo. If your research target owned land there, you can find them, but it'll be a quicker process if you know which township.

P.S. OOPS...somewhere along the line I forgot to remember to mention that my first sight of this link was over at In Deeds. Thanks!!

thanks...

...to those who voted MMH into the good company of Family Tree Magazine's top 40 genealogy blogs. Others in the "regional & local" category hail from Sandusky and California. Check out the whole list. I've already found some I should be reading -- and quoting!

Evisceration

The news is not good from Michigan. For all those who live or work there, here's the informative letter from the Michigan Genealogical Council on the situation as of February 21. The Library of Michigan faces a 23% budget cut; its staff will soon be reduced to 30 (once it was 100); and many services and non-Michigan holdings are likely to be terminated. Lobbying may help a little, but we may have to hope that institutions with better funding will be able to take up some of the slack.

Hoosiers shouldn't look down on Michigan's troubles; the Indiana State Archives has been poorly housed, underfunded, and understaffed for many years. The staff and volunteers are great, but they need better support.

Part of Berrien County, Michigan, is in Kalamazoo?

Recently I quoted a non-genealogist archives user on the value of consulting with the keepers of the records -- well, the other day the advice came to life when Sharon Carlson, the director of Western Michigan University's Archives and Regional History Collections in Kalamazoo, advised me to go beyond the newspaper research I had planned and consult the index created by former director Wayne C. Mann as part of his own research.

It's actually more what I would call a "living index," because he photocopied various newspaper articles and other items, and filed one copy each under each surname mentioned in the article. No brick walls collapsed, but I found information on friends and associates of my research target that I never could have in any other way.

It's been microfilmed (43 reels!) and the Family History Library calls it "The Southern Berrien County, Michigan Index" and notes that it tends to cover the townships on either side of the state line from Rolling Prairie to South Bend on the Indiana side and Berrien and St. Joseph counties on the Michigan side. So, depending on your geographical orientation, you may wish to consult this Berrien County resource either in Kalamazoo or Salt Lake City.

(And just FYI: if you're looking for Berrien County probate court records after 1838, you'll find them, not in Kalamazoo, but in Berrien Springs at the Berrien County Historical Association, which is an archive as well.)

Why didn't my ancestors stop in Crawfordsville?

Valerie Beaudrault at the New England Historical and Genealogical Society's Enews (10 February) calls attention to the awesome amount of digitized information for west central Indiana's Montgomery County at the Crawfordsville Public Library District web site.

Research Confidential: How to Visit an Archive

The new anthology edited by Northwestern University sociologist Eszter Hargittai, Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have (University of Michigan Press), features young researchers telling more truth than usual about the details of their research work. Some of the chapters are very relevant to genealogy, oral history, and microhistory.

My favorite one-liner came from editor Hargittai from the introduction: "Good research takes longer than you expect. . . . If one is lucky, the work will only take twice as long as planned." {3}

There's some amazing material on interviews after 9/11 and with people of different social classes and ethnicities than your own. But in the end my favorite of the individual contributions was Jason Gallo on doing archival research:

Having gained access to the collection, located a suitable desk, table, or carrel to set up your equipment, and then head straight to a reference librarian or archival specialist. This is perhaps the most important task on your first day . . . . On your first visit you will make dozens of mistakes; however, the biggest mistake that you can make is not to ask a trained professional to help you with your research. . . . A professional can point you toward that record groupo, box, series, or folder of documents that contains the missing piece -- the needle in the haystack -- of your research puzzle.

I have no idea what these people think about genealogy, but we and they clearly face, and hopefully surmount, many of the same situations.