Weekend wonderings: input from other fields?

Most genealogists bring experience in other fields to this one. Often you can maximize your contribution by not hiding your previous light under a bushel (as one friend has reminded me). Common cross-pollinating careers that I've encountered are historian, journalist, teacher, librarian, artist, technology expert, audio-visual technician, anthropologist . . .

What was your previous life? What's the most unusual contributing career you've encountered?


Harold Henderson, "Input from other fields," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Professionals and amateurs, together forever

When genealogists get talking about professionalism, we often tend to compare genealogy unfavorably to well-established professions like doctors and lawyers. I think that better comparison groups are drivers, writers, and people involved in child care. (And this applies whether you define "professional" as "doing it for money" or as "doing it to high standards.")

Each of these three fields is divided between:

(1) a small group of experienced and knowledgeable professionals, and

(2) a large and constantly replenished group of amateurs. Some of the amateurs are quite competent. Others may actually be dangerous to themselves, their neighbors, and their respective professionals -- such as the guy who cut me off yesterday, or the amateur writer who omitted the comma from "Let's eat, grandma."

Within each occupational group, amateurs and professionals interact constantly and have an ill-defined and sometimes uncomfortable relationship.

In genealogy and driving, there are some standards-based ways to identify professionals based on performance. You have to have a certain class license to drive a semi, and you have to be OKd by the proper body to use the initials CG or AG. But the tension remains.

Just having standards and being able to enforce them in some ways doesn't erase the need to continuously negotiate the nebulous boundaries between amateur and professional. There will always be more amateurs, and some of them will look askance at those who do genealogy for pay, or who insist on reference notes. I don't see any long-term "solution," just ongoing discussion, education, and maneuvering.

Even the medical profession, which over the last century achieved strong control over who can practice medicine, is frittering away its franchise by what I (as the opinionated child of a physician) see as a combination of expense, inconvenience, arrogance, and industrial-style production-line health care. These days my wife and I  get our flu shots from a pharmacist, who unlike an M.D. is readily accessible at short notice. We also often get our everyday medical advice from family members in auxiliary health professions or from WebMD or the Berkeley Wellness Letter.

For professionals there is no permanent victory, only eternal vigilance -- and eternal flexibility.


Harold Henderson, "Professionals and amateurs, together forever," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Chicago in the 1890s, all the details

Indiana-born writer George Ade (1866-1944) wrote "stories of the streets and the town" in the Chicago Record between 1893 and 1900. The back-cover blurb for a published selection of them pays tribute to four key aspects of his work: "his keen eye for the absurd and sublime moments of daily urban life, his ear for the vernacular of late-nineteenth-century Chicago, his shrewd understanding of the midwestern character, and above all his firm belief that all of human life was worthy literary subject matter."

Acclaimed in his lifetime and largely forgotten since, Ade interested me particularly because he arrived in Chicago about the same time as my paternal grandfather and his father, brothers, and sister. The scenes he painted are those that Alexander Henderson lived: "Small Shops of the City," "Old Days on the Canal," "With the Market-Gardeners," "Little Billy as a Committeeman," "The Junk-Shops of Canal Street," "Vehicles Out of the Ordinary," "Sidewalk Merchants and Their Wares," "The Glory of Being a Coachman," "Life on a River Tug," and "Clark Street Chinamen." Ade also did mild social commentary on art, manners, and slang.

In these pieces there is no trace of sensationalism or self-promotion; Ade himself remains entirely in the background. Many of these pieces give no names or precise locations; others may use concocted names or are composites. But at least one is a real person. Ade visited with English-born Mrs. Sarah Barrington, then a widow taking in boarders and selling cigars at the historic Green Tree Inn, built in 1833 and later relocated onto Milwaukee Avenue.

She has the curtains drawn and the door chained. The visitor must pull vigorously at the bell-knob and she will inspect him through an inch or two of opened door before admitting him. She has one big room and a little kitchen. A portrait of the duke of Wellington hangs over her arm-chair. ... In the saloon and cigar store, as well as in Mrs. Barrington's private apartments, the floor is hilly and the widows have warped to an angle, the ceilings are low, the wainscoting narrow and the doorways cramped.... but in its general aspect the oldest building in Chicago is not sufficiently picturesque to attract attention on its merits.... [Mrs. Barrington] only hoped she could sell the place for enough money to take her back to England and keep her there.

This portrait of Ade's can be quickly filled out with a sketchy first search of indexes and records available on line: Sarah Murray and Alfred Barrington were reportedly married in Cook County 17 February 1872. In 1880 she was the 60-year-old wife of Alfred, a cigar dealer aged 70, on Milwaukee Avenue. In 1890 she was living at 35 Milwaukee Avenue, her business "cigars." The easily available records also show that her dream was not realized. Eighty-two-year old Sarah Barrington died 19 January 1902  of mitral disease of the heart and chronic rheumatism at the "Chicago Home for Incurables" and is buried at Rose Hill Cemetery.

Ade's papers are at the Newberry Library; the Chicago History Museum appears to hold copies of the eight early books that collected his columns. The edition I'm reading, cited below, is selected, and does not provide the dates when the originals were published.



George Ade, "At the Green Tree Inn," in Franklin J. Meine, ed., Stories of Chicago (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), reprint of the Caxton Club 1941 edition, pp. 70-74.


Illinois Statewide Marriage Index, 1763-1900, Barrington-Murray 1872, citing Cook County vol. 76, license 1804; http://www.ilsos.gov/isavital/marriagesrch.jsp : accessed 28 June 2012.


1880 US Census, Cook County, Illinois, population schedule, Chicago, enumeration district 101, p. 433D (stamped), p. 28 (penned), dwelling 195, family 238, Alfred Barrington household for Sarah Barrington; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 28 June 2012).

The Lakeside Annual Directory of the City of Chicago 1890, p. 234, col. 2, Mrs. Sarah Barrington; digital image, Fold3.com (http://www.footnote.com/image/#85257109 : accessed 27 June 2012).

City of Chicago, Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Report of Death no. 967, Sarah Barrington, 1902; digital image,"Illinois, Cook County Deaths, 1878-1922," FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-266-11671-83719-94?cc=1463134 : accessed 27 June 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Chicago in the 1890s, all the details," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

 

Chicago History, vol. 38, no. 1(Spring 2012):

Learning to ask the hardest question

One of the essential, least expected, and least polite questions in beginning genealogy is also the simplest:

"How do you know?"

In the beginning, we have to ask the family member who is sure that your Websters are all related to Daniel Webster . . . somehow.

Later, we have to ask the helpful stranger who responds to an on-line query by sending you a virtual pile of alleged information about your mutual ancestors.

Later, we have to ask the client with preconceived opinions as to what more research will turn up.

Without this question, it's all for nought. No point in learning about citations if we don't know what to cite. No point in putting together a (nonfiction) book or article about the family.

To ask this question is to step out from the comfortable home hearthside into the cold still outdoor air of history. It also challenges others to do the same.

The people who ignore the question are happy with their mythology (some of which may well be true). Those who object indignantly to the question want the credibility of calling themselves genealogists without doing the work. Those who answer and try to improve their answer are on the road to success.



Harold Henderson, "Learning to ask the hardest question," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mostly Midwestern genealogy finds on and off the web

* The summer issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly includes a well-cited article by Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five Ferguson Brothers from Scotland."A bonus for me: ISGSQ is using footnotes instead of the dreaded endnotes.


* As usual, the Ohio Genealogy News is packed with instructional articles of interest. For Summer 2012, I particularly enjoyed:

Chris Staats' "Deed Anatomy 101" with a clever graphic;

Joyce Quigley's "Online Cemetery Research" (interment records!); and

Delores Jones's "My Last Name is Jones (Success with a Common Surname)": "The only way I found my Jones family in the 1930 U.S. census for Mississippi was by reading my late aunt's papers again."


* Whenever you're in a law library, take the opportunity to snoop around. During IGHR at Samford, some sharp-eyed Pennsylvania researchers found an unlikely treasure: county-level court case reports for several counties in Pennsylvania, mostly from the 20th century. Who knew?


* Joe Beine has updated his wonderful index to on-line indexes of death records of various kinds, including indexes for ten Midwestern counties:

in Illinois -- DeKalb, McDonough, Sangamon, and Will;

in Michigan -- Menominee, Oakland, and Wayne;

in Ohio -- Montgomery; and

in Wisconsin -- Barron and Eau Claire.





Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five Ferguson Brothers from Scotland,"Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 74-91.

Ohio Genealogy News, vol 43, no. 2 (Summer 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Midwestern genealogy finds on and off the web," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

My ancestor had $1000 in 1860 -- was he rich?

As genealogists, we need to make the world of the past as understandable as possible to our present-day audience. One way is to translate dollar values from, say, 1800, into current money. Sounds simple? It's not.

According to Westegg, $100 in 1800 would be worth $1265.30 in 2010.

According to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, $100 in 1800 would be worth $1284.90 in 2010.

According to Measuring Worth, $100 in 1800 would be worth something between $1730 and $3,050,000 in 2010. It depends on exactly what you're valuing, and which of ten different measures you work with.

One problem with these translations is that the passage of time changes things in many dimensions. You could buy bread in both 1800 and 2010, but it was relatively more expensive in 1800. Not even a multibillionaire in 1800 could buy a car, a liver transplant, or a post on Facebook. Few people in 2010 could buy a buggy whip -- or a comfortable place to spend the night in a strange city without presenting an identity card. Not only have the items of the typical "market basket" changed, so have their values relative to one another. So even the best translations are unlikely to agree.

Of the three reputable sites above, Measuring Worth offers the most detailed and thoughtful explanation. Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, both economists at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explain that it works best to use different measures to compare commodities, income/wealth, and projects over time. "There is no single 'correct' measure," they conclude, "and economic historians use one or more different indicators depending on the context of the question." On the site they use ten different measures -- check it out! You can measure by the Consumer Price Index or the proportion of Gross Domestic Product or the average laborer's wage, and get different results that highlight different aspects of the changes over time. (See the gasoline example at the bottom of this page: among other things, we learn that a gallon of gasoline is only one-sixth as great a part of the Gross Domestic Product now as it was in 1949.)

So even this piece of genealogical context isn't a simple lookup! I would suggest a couple of ways to use these tools without stretching them to absurdity, confusing your readers, or having to go back to school and major in economics:

(1) Focus on shorter time intervals. If your research target owned $200 worth of real estate in 1850 and $1,000 in 1860, how much of that was true gain and how much was inflationary? Many of the conundrums of long time comparisons do not apply to short-term comparisons, because the economic world didn't change radically during any single decade.

(2) Use cross-sectional comparisons -- where your ancestor stood relative to others, rather than trying for a precise dollar value. For instance, in the agricultural schedule of the US census for 1860, you can learn the cash value of your research target's farm -- and use Kennedy's 1864 statistical compilation of agricultural information from that census to calculate the average (mean or median, it could make a difference) value of a farm in their county. It may be more pertinent to learn how their farm stacked up against neighbors in that time and place than to get a dollar value in 2010, when farming is no longer such an omnipresent occupation.

In any case, studying the various comparisons gives us another sense of how different the past really was.


Lawrence H. Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, "Measures of Worth," Measuring Worth, 2010 (www.measuringworth.com/worthmeasures.php : accessed 24 June 2012).


Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in 1860 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1864); digital image, Internet Archive (http://archive.org/details/agricultureunit01kenngoog : accessed 24 June 2012).



Harold Henderson, "My ancestor had $1000 in 1860 -- was he rich?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New at Midwest Roots and LibraryThing: Baptists, travel, and the worst of the 20th century

Last week I picked up an interesting resource for 20th-century research at Samford University library's perpetual used-book sale: the 1949 and 1950 student directories for the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Free lookups in these or my other 15 miscellaneous mostly Midwestern sources here.

Also new on my booklist at LibraryThing: Travel Accounts of Indiana, 1679-1961. So far my favorite quote comes from a Dunker Baptist head of household between La Porte and Michigan City. In 1836 he found a carriageful of travelers at his door, stranded by a flood and washed-out bridge, and greeted them cheerfully, saying: "You know you would not have staid with me, if you could have helped it; and I would not have had you, if I could have helped it; so no more words about it; but let us make ourselves comfortable." (p. 161) You just don't hear that frank talk from motels these days.

The most recent book on that booklist that I actually read straight through was Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands -- almost unendurable, but very important to tell because most published sources on World War II had access only to the Soviet or Nazi archives, not both. The total tale of the multiple deliberate mass murders in that stretch of country between Russia and Germany (including the Holocaust itself) is one of the worst stories in human history, and of course many Americans have ancestors and relatives who died there or who narrowly escaped by timely emigration earlier in the 20th century.




Directory 1949 and Directory 1950 (Louisville KY: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2825 Lexington Road).

Harriet Martineau, [June 19, 1836], in Shirley S. McCord, comp., Travel Accounts of Indiana, 1679-1961: A Collection of Observations by Wayfaring Foreigners, Itinerants, and Peripatetic Hoosiers (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1970), Indiana Historical Collections, Vol. 47. "Her comments are in Michigan History Magazine, 7 (1923):61-72, from the original Society in America (3 vols., London, 1837)."

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).


Harold Henderson, "New at Midwest Roots and LibraryThing: Baptists, travel, and the worst of the 20th century," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]