Women Teachers on the Frontier

Sometimes the problem is not so much locating a source, but knowing that such a source even exists in the first place! My son turned up Polly Welts Kaufman's Women Teachers on the Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) in connection with his history project, but it's also an interesting kind of genealogy source. I didn't find it on Google Books or Internet Archive, but hard copies are available at reasonable prices on AbeBooks. And Worldcat shows many copies in Midwestern libraries, both public and college.

The book is not some simplified narrative, it's a publication directly derived from relatively little-known original sources, in this case records of the National Popular Education Board of the 1850s, residing largely in the Connecticut Historical Society -- diaries and letters of women teachers who seized the opportunity to go on their own to the frontier, earn a living, and help civilize and bring Protestantism to it.

Don't expect to find your New England or New York ancestress here (although that is possible). Do expect to find outsider accounts of the Midwestern frontier, especially in Indiana and Illinois -- and do also expect take into account their inevitable bias toward "uplift" and a certain brand of religion.

A similar source that I had already heard of and looked into are the letters from men in the American Home Missionary Society. For more information on them, you can start where I did, with John Beatty's article in the September 2007 issue of the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center's e-zine "Genealogy Gems."

Milwaukee Marriages 1822-1876 on line

Research Buzz alerts us to a new on-line resource from the Milwaukee Public Library Digital Collections, already well worth a visit: the Milwaukee County Marriage Certificate collection. Here's part of the admirably clear and thorough description:

In the 1960s a box of marriage certificates created between 1822 and 1876 was found at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. The box also included some miscellaneous documents pertaining to the marriage such as permission to marry slips, authorizations, and land deeds. The information in these documents include a parent giving permission for an underage child to marry, an affidavit of there being no impediment to marriage, information on the closeness of the blood relationship, and written permission for the clerk to hand the marriage license to a third party for delivery. These documents generally do not have standardized information, but can be quite interesting. Many of these documents were not in very good condition. Research by the Milwaukee County Genealogical Society (MCGS) indicates that most of these certificates are not recorded at the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Some of the records appear in the Wisconsin Pre-1907 Marriage Index and some do not.

The certificates and accompanying documents were filmed in 1966. The Milwaukee Public Library owns a set of these microfilmed marriage certificates. In 1999 the MCGS arranged to have the records refilmed, adding location citations. In 2000 MCGS volunteers created alphabetical indexes for bride and for groom. Roger Cobb with Lois Molitor acted as project coordinators. Over 42,000 names were put into the database that produced the indexes. Unfortunately, the original copies that were filmed in 1966 have vanished. . . .

Most of these documents were created in Milwaukee, but there are a few from other locations. The number of certificates created outside of Milwaukee County is minimal.

In short, if you have Milwaukee people, visit this site yesterday!

Civil War Memory and more

The on-line general-interest history journal Common-Place is always interesting, but this is special. I can see that it's going to open up a bunch more blogs for me to keep an eye on!

The Past Is Still Another Country...

I didn't expect to find that much genealogically relevant in Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Press, 2005). But it's hardly ever a mistake to read someone who can say something this obvious and make it new -- make you really realize it for the first time:

"Throughout recorded history, most people in Europe -- as elsewhere in the world -- had possessed just four kinds of things: those they inherited from their parents; those they made for themselves; those they bartered or exchanged with others; and those few items they had been obliged to purchase for cash, almost always made by someone they knew." (p. 337)

Association of Professional Genealogists

A big thank-you to those readers who are members of the Association of Professional Genealogists (APG) and who, in a pre-Thanksgiving surprise, elected me to a two-year term on the organization's board. (And I hope that any reader who is not a member will consider becoming one.) I expect to learn a lot, but here is where I started (from my pre-election statement):

Over the past three years I have benefited from listening and participating on APG's email list, from reading the quarterly, from attending the Professional Management Conference, from involvement in the Great Lakes Chapter -- and from working the table at conferences! I'd like to put my experience to work, and build on past volunteers' accomplishments, by helping APG become both more inclusive and more professional.

Inclusive: by making transparency a priority, including prompt publication of board and EC minutes.

Professional: by encouraging, recognizing, and eventually requiring continuing education among members -- or in some other appropriate way acting on Tom Jones's critique published in the December 2007 APG Quarterly. His point was that for genealogy to mature, its professional organization needs to ask more of its members than just to pay dues and subscribe to a code of ethics.

Kansas on-line indexes

Even the on-line world is turning to materials a bit beyond the usual vital records in the usual vital places. These happen to be in Kansas, a frequent destination point for dwellers in the "old Midwest." Doctors' licenses, fraternal order notices, letters from home, and more, searchable thanks to the Kansas State Historical Society. Don't give up on your Kansas research target without checking these.

Hat tip to ProGenealogists, maybe the most hard-core genealogy blog out there, for the initial tip.

Census Dates of Record

Thanks to the Region Roots blog from Lake County (Indiana) Public Library for posting this handy reference guide to the official census dates of record for the fifteen US censuses currently publicly available (1790-1930). For a quick handy bookmark you can't beat it.

These dates are more important than the date when the census taker showed up at your ancestor's household. If the census taker and the informant understood the census instructions and followed them, each census entry should reflect the household composition as of the date of record, not the date the census taker was actually there.

Of course not everyone followed the instructions, but in figuring out what a record means, the first step (ideally) is to know the rules under which it was created. If you want to know all about the rules involved in the creation of what may be the #1 most used genealogy source, one useful reference is the Census Bureau's 2002 publication Measuring America, available for free on line in Part 1 and Part 2 in PDF format.