Elkhart County, Indiana

Genealogists love free stuff, and if you have research targets in north central Indiana, resources have been kindly provided by your colleagues that you may not know about, although it is not technically news: an on-line index of microfilmed loose probate papers (and some related court cases) known by the acronym CRIMP.

You can read the full story there; the index was compiled by Ned and Bea Parcell. You can tell it was done by genealogists, because in addition to the numbers needed to access the records, they included a sprinkling of other names involved on each set of probate papers, so that readers of the index can get a notion of whether these are indeed the people they're looking for.

The index then allows you to visit the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, or visit a local Family History Center and order the appropriate microfilm (using a conversion table to get the right number, available on the above site). Or you can visit the Elkhart County Historical Society library located in the county historical museum in the former Bristol High School, where the films are available for viewing. It's also possible to download your selected images onto a thumb drive -- all at no charge. The amount of embedded effort involved in making one local record set accessible is hard to calculate, or appreciate. And one of the best ways to repay is to help add more records to the store.

Happy Holidays from the St. Joseph County Public Library!

The November-December newsletter from the St. Joseph County (Indiana) Public Library's Local History and Genealogy Services arrived before the 25th, but I didn't. Fortunately this is a gift without an expiration date, especially for those with "Michiana" research targets. Sara Allen compiled a list of area libraries' on-line obituary databases:

South Bend (St. Joseph County IN) 1913-present
Bremen (Marshall County IN) before 1997
Elkhart (Elkhart County IN) 1921-present
Michigan City (La Porte County IN) 1887-present
Niles (Berrien County MI)
Plymouth (Marshall County IN) 1922-1979
Wakarusa (Elkhart County IN)

You can google the public libraries in question, or hang on until this issue of the newsletter is up at the above site. More on Elkhart County in a later post.

Twas the night before Christmas, and a potential hiatus was looming

Due to a variety of conflicting commitments (doesn't that sound like those old obituaries that say so-and-so died of "complications"?), posting here will be more intermittent than usual for the next month. Don't neglect to visit my blogging buddies! (See the names in the subject line for hints.) If you weren't counting, this is post #720.

Unwrap this present BEFORE Christmas!

World Vital Records is offering free access to a number of 20th-century city and business directories -- too many to list here, and (I am told) ending on the 26th. For our area of interest, you're in luck if you need

Belleville, St. Clair County, Illinois
Kohler, Sheboygan/Ozaukee counties, Wisconsin
Plymouth, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin
Sheboygan, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin
Sheboygan Falls, Sheboygan County, Wisconsin

but there are plenty more. Check the whole list because not all the offerings for each place are together.

Hat tip to Diane Walsh on Rootsweb's St. Clair County list.

Sometimes there's no substitute for bricks and mortar

Recently I visited the William H. Willennar Genealogy Center, a free-standing portion of the Eckhart Public Library in Auburn, DeKalb County, Indiana. If you have ancestors in the tri-state area where Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan converge, and they might have been in DeKalb, this is the place to start. Call first (they're opening an hour later these days than the web site says), and come prepared. The main library catalog is helpful in determining their holdings ahead of time. I can tell you they include local newspapers on microfilm and a wealth of vital and cemetery records and indexes, as well as vertical files and a plenty of school censuses and yearbooks. Few of these items are on line. And it's a beautiful and friendly place to work.

Not every county has a local philanthropist this generous, but more and more have their own unique go-to place. And it can be called many names. In some places it's a historical society, in others a genealogical society, in others it is in the local library. You won't know unless you ask.

Depending on the nature of your quest, the courthouse may be the next stop, which in Auburn isn't far at all. And if your research targets created some more records across a county or state line, it doesn't hurt any that the Allen County Public Library's Genealogy Center is a half-hour's drive south on I-69.

You don't read enough blogs...

...so here's a tip. I just bumped into The Historical Society blog (thanks to Legal History) and found:

* the post I went looking for, recommending Frank Luther Mott's 1947 Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (including many you never heard of, but chances are your ancestors did), and

* a discussion of who people were probably thinking of when they named kids "Darwin" in the early 19th century. Both posts by Dan Allosso.

There's more. For the historically-minded genealogist (which I hope is all of us), this looks like a keeper.

BTW, Mott's book appears to be searchable but not previewable on Google Books. Check your library or AbeBooks.

Data mining past publications

Marian Pierre-Louis shared this interesting link from the Boston Globe via Facebook about a new study published in Science and a new tool Google has made publicly available. The gist:

Google is publicly launching the tool, Google Books Ngram Viewer, to allow scholars or the simply curious to ask questions, such as when references to “The Great War,’’ which peaked between 1915 and 1941, were replaced by “World War I.’’ The tool allows people to look up words or phrases that range from one to five words, and see their occurrences over time — the frequency that a word is mentioned in a given year divided by the total number of words written that year.

I'm sure we can learn a lot from this. And like all tools going back to the sharp stick, it can be misused as well. Counting things is never the whole story. As noted in the article, the way in which words are used may mean more than their frequency. And sometimes the revealing fact lies in what things that are not mentioned, what books were never published, or words whose meaning has subtly shifted over time.