Midwesterners in NGS Magazine January-March issue

If you're hungry for Midwestern genealogy, the current issue of the National Genealogical Society's NGS Magazine has four treats for you:

(1) Jennifer Holik-Urban's story on her WWI great-great uncle Michael Kokoska, who died in France but was eventually laid to rest in his family's plot in Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago;

(2) Nancy Neils Wehner's story on tracing her WWII Navy grandfather, who enlisted in Omaha, trained near Chicago, and was finally assigned to Tank Ship LST-599 in Evansville (Indiana);

(3) Cari A. Taplin on her northwestern Ohio Sly family's "relationship" to the southern Ohio Slye family of TV cowboy Roy Rogers; and

(4) a bouquet of identity-determination case studies ranging over several states from Minnesota's J. H. Fonkert, CG.

Ohio Genealogy News Spring 2011

The Ohio Genealogy News -- the genealogy newsmagazine that outdoes some other states' quarterlies -- focuses on Civil War genealogy research this quarter. But I'd say the whole issue is worth it for explaining where to find the Cleveland District Round Table's index to the Cuyahoga County probate record images that FamilySearch has posted only in browseable form.

In other news, Ohio Genealogical Society's 50th annual conference begins later this week in Columbus. See you there!

Lillian is back!

It's time for a second peek into the daily life of 90-some years ago in the rural northwestern corner of Illinois, in the second volume of Lillian's Diaries: Whispers from Galena's Past, Volume 2, 1920-1925. So far I have only been able to find volume 1 on Amazon; volume 2 should be there soon. My review of volume 1, with some thoughts on what diaries do and don't give us, was published in the Utah Genealogical Association's Crossroads quarterly in December (available here to members).

According to Lillian's editor and cousin Sheryl Trudgian Jones, this volume has more researcher-friendly appendages than the first, including a map of Jo Daviess County, Ilinois; a glossary; and hundreds of surnames from the diaries. Excerpts from the diaries also appear in Jones's blog, "Leaves on the Trudgian Tree," as I noted in an earlier post.

Old times in new media

Check out the blog-linked tweets quoted from original historical documents of the Civil War, as described in Salon. Hat tip to ResearchBuzz.

Our Savage Neighbors

I can't think of many nonfiction books that were so gruesome and depressing that I deliberately quit reading them, but I almost did that halfway through Peter Silver's Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). So it's not for everyone.

Most of the book is a close and careful reading of what people wrote and said about the ongoing Indian guerrilla wars in Pennsylvania and nearby colonies from about 1750 to 1785 -- so it will be of interest to anyone with ancestors or relatives in that unprecedentedly diverse and turbulent society of English, Germans, Irish, Indians, and other groups.

Silver draws many interesting and provocative ideas from this material, among them:

• Diversity itself, he finds, did not lead to mutual tolerance and understanding -- indeed, often the opposite as people reacted against their neighbors. However, having an outside enemy sometimes did. {xviii-xix}

• Even a few people who were willing to use violence had inordinate power to shape events. Their actions often set off a chain of revenge that led to major changes and wars, as in the case of the Paxton boys and the 1782 genocidal massacre of pacifist Christian Indians by white Americans at Gnadenhütten in what is now Tuscarawas County, Ohio. {xxv-xxvi, 265ff.}

• Racial prejudice as we know it played very little role on the white side of the Indian wars of the 1700s (racism as we know it was not invented until the following century). {294ff.} More important were fear and greed for land.

• "Somehow, out of such unpromising beginnings, one of history's most self-consciously tolerant societies was made. The idea of 'the white people' may have helped some people to feel greater sympathetic identification with other Europeans -- even as it made a few, like the Quakers, into cultural villains, and drove up negative feelings toward all Indians." {xxiii}

Nineteenth-century credit reports

You'll never get to eyeball these records unless you can convince the gatekeepers at Hahvahd (Business School, Baker Library) that you're a "scholar," a word they use in opposition to "genealogist."

So you might as well learn what you can from historian Dan Alosso's critical examination of this original source that seems to resemble death certificates in that it contains a mix of primary and secondary information -- or to put it another way, a mix of first-hand knowledge and gossip, with the power to make or to ruin local businesspeople who depended on out-of-town credit.

Peoria Public Library genealogy

One of our family's iconic photographs shows my three sisters sitting on the steps of the old Peoria (Illinois) Public Library building with their books. It was our go-to library when growing up (usually we had way more books than this), even after the old building was demolished and replaced with a plain-vanilla modernist structure. When our own children were young we lived within walking distance.

All of this to explain why I'm especially interested to learn that the library's new genealogy section is opening (at a time when many libraries are retrenching).