Remembering Rail Records -- How To Get On Track

Imagine an industry so huge that it had an office in every town of any size; that was a hub of techological innovation; that was indispensable to travel and commerce everywhere; that employed and maintained records nationwide -- some kind of hybrid of the internet and the automobile and computer industries.

That was the railroads a century ago, the grimy metallic heart of the nation. One reason we don't consult their records often is a failure of imagination -- these days trains are at best a sideshow in our lives. Another reason is that the records are scattered and in many cases have been destroyed, especially employment records. But it's still worth looking, as a recent discussion on the APG email list reminded me. (Also a hat tip to Paula Stuart Warren's blog post about the Minnesota Historical Society's good work.)

Best overviews (not necessarily best as to current record locations, all URLs as of 29 July 2012):

Wendy L. Elliott, CG(sm), "Railroad Records for Genealogical Research," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 75(4): 271-77 (available free on line to NGS members). As an overview, more thorough and authoritative than anything else linked to in this post.

David A. Pfeiffer, "Riding the Rails Up Paper Mountain: Researching Railroad Records in the National Archives," Prologue vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 1997)

David Pfeiffer, Records Relating to North American Railroads, Reference Information Paper 91 (Washington DC: NARA, 2001)

Current information on Railroad Retirement Board records (for long-term employees post-1936):
RRB's two-year-old statement
NARA Record Group 184
The pension claims series within that record group

Union records such as this premier African-American union can cut across company lines:
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Chicago Division, 1925-1969, at the Chicago History Museum

The more information you can gather ahead of time on your railroad research target person, the better. It's often key to figure out which line he worked for. The sites below vary greatly and are not a substitute for Cyndi's List on railroad records. or the historical society list at RailroadData.com. The libraries and archives below often have great finding aids. The railroad historical societies often cater to modelers (the re-enactors of the train world) more than to historical research.

A good place to start is the railroad-related holdings of Chicago's Newberry Library.

Baltimore & Ohio

Burlington
Friends of BN genealogy referrals
Newberry Library holdings on this line are in process, but you can check out their blog "Everywhere West" and a photo collection. Actually I really like that blog, especially as a way to wade into the records gradually!

Chicago & Eastern Illinois 

Chicago & Northwestern Historical Society

Erie Railroad 

Great Northern records at the Minnesota Historical Society.

Illinois Central at the Newberry Library
Illinois Central Historical Society

Missouri Pacific

Monon workers index

Northern Pacific at the Minnesota Historical Society

Pennsylvania Railroad at Temple University


Harold Henderson, "Remembering Rail Records -- How To Get On Track," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]















a combo of GM/Toyota and Microsoft back in the day

Local Laws in Indiana on line, a sampling

We think of laws as general and impersonal, but legislatures also pass "private" or "local" laws directed to individuals or localities -- sometimes fairly routine, sometimes to redress injustices. These private laws were more common in earlier days and in Indiana are preserved in books published for each session of the General Assembly. Some are on line, some not -- but in either case the titling and cataloging are irregular. Many libraries catalog them as serials. Since the legislature began meeting in December and carried over into the next year, dating can be an issue. GoogleBooks makes its online copies rather hard to find. I have located six years there, 1843-1847 and 1850.

La Porte County, Indiana, is mentioned 30 times in these six books, an average of five items per year. They included:

* a few divorces,

* a few cases of aliens who owned and sold land,

* several incorporations of local institutions and businesses, usually naming the directors,

* some road authorizations with names of commissioners and directions (“on as straight a line as the nature of the ground will admit of”), and

* some routine, or just plain weird. I'm still scratching my head over the county commissioners' being authorized "to make John Johnson, of said county, the same allowance for the arrest of a horse thief, calling himself John Johnson, as they might have made if said horse thief had been convicted of said crime.”

Full details and access instructions if you get stuck are over at Midwest Roots.

In addition to looking for particular people, these books can be used as a kind of on-the-scene history, a bit like the "annuals" that encyclopedias used to publish. Names of businesses and institutions changed over time, and often the hardest part of researching people connected with them is figuring out what they were called at the time. So it may be helpful to know that in 1846 the legislature amended the charter of La Porte University so that its medical school would be known as Indiana Medical College. Those institutions are long gone but they were significant in early Midwest medical education.

Local histories tend to focus on those enterprises and individuals that succeeded and stuck around; the lawmakers didn't know the future, so this is a place to look for a "clay turnpike company," plank roads, and off-brand railroads that may have never run a train. History is often written by the winners; genealogy is written by everybody.


ADDED TUESDAY MORNING 31 July:
Two useful sets of information from this source in Indiana have been extracted, indexed, and published:

Malinda E. E. Newhard, Name Changes Granted by the Indiana General Assembly Prior to 1852 (Harlan, IN: author, 1981)

Malinda E. E. Newhard, Divorces Granted by the Indiana General Assembly Prior to 1852 (Harlan, IN: author, 1981). Note that in some cases the General Assembly actually granted the divorce, and in others it authorized the filing of a court case locally.

Newhard cited General Laws 1817-1851, Local Laws 1835-1851, and Special Laws 1818, 1824, and 1831.

Plank road scrip illustration from Sellitstore (http://sellitstore.ecrater.com/p/9628689/michigan-city-union-plank-road# : accessed 28 July 2012), where the bill once said to be worth $5 was for sale for $125.

Harold Henderson, "Local Laws in Indiana on line, a sampling," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Jenny Lind, Elvis Presley, and the Evolution of Property in the US

UCLA law professor Stuart Banner has written American Property, a lively, smart history of how some things have quit being property (human beings, public office, and commons, for instance) and others have become property over the past 300+ years. New forms of property include fame/privacy (your picture), news, certain pollution rights, the electromagnetic spectrum, and many living things.

I think its main value for genealogists lies in seeing how property changes historically, and not in the way we might think. Non-physical property was well understood long ago; physical items like transplantable organs have only recently become in some cases quasi-property. And the changes are usually driven by technology, wealth, politics, and popularity, not legal theory or idealism. And if you want up-to-date, in the final chapter, Banner debunks the idea that information wants to be free.

So I view this as kind of a back-door history that tells us once again, from another angle, how much the past is another country. "Jenny Lind had toured the country in the 1850s without profiting from the sale of Jenny Lind merchandise, but when Elvis Presley toured the country in the 1950s, he likely earned more from licensing fees than from ticket sales." Lind's agent, P. T. Barnum, was fine with unauthorized Lind merchandise, which was just as well since there was no way for him to stop it. Elvis's agent, on the other hand, took unauthorized Elvis purveyors to court and never lost a case. {155} About the same time (mid-19th century), "goodwill" as a business asset and a form of property also came into its own. {38-39}



Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)


Harold Henderson, "Jenny Lind, Elvis Presley, and the Evolution of Property in the US," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Weekend Writing: Stop the Zombie Nouns!

If the reader can't figure out what action is taking place, then the writer has fallen into a pit. Always. So following Helen Sword's advice in this New York Times article can greatly improve our writing.

Do you have trouble spotting zombie nouns? Just look for those ending in "tion." Or look for weak linking verbs ("be," "is," "was," "are," "were" when used without other verbs), and rewrite the sentence using real active verbs. The act of doing so forces us to understand the reality, just as having to cite our sources forces us to understand them. (Linking verbs do have their place -- in this sentence and the next, for instance -- but it is not all over every page of our writing.)

Sword refers back to George Orwell, one of the very best 20th-century writers, showing that, like other kinds of zombies, this problem has proven very difficult to kill.


Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily.

ADDED 6 PM CST SUNDAY: If you're interested, I'll be leading an APG online discussion on writing Tuesday at 9 PM EDT, 8 PM CDT. BYOQ (Bring Your Own Questions). First come, first served, limit 25: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/join/128858424, access code 128-858-424.



Helen Sword, "Zombie Nouns," Opinionator, New York Times (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/23/zombie-nouns : accessed 25 July 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Weekend Writing: Stop the Zombie Nouns!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

All the Details: Grace Dumelle on Illinois State Mental Hospital Records

Grace Dumelle -- author, house historian, and Newberry librarian -- has just the sort of very thorough post on the Newberry blog that genealogists love. That goes double for genealogists with research targets who were in the Illinois state mental health hospital system.



Grace Dumelle, "Help in Accessing Closed Records of Illinois State Mental Hospitals," The Newberry Genealogy Blog, 26 July 2012 (http://www.newberry.org/help-accessing-closed-records-illinois-state-mental-hospitals : accessed 28 July 2012).

Weekend Wonderings: What Would You Write About?

Suppose, just hypothetically, that you were tapped (or inspired) to write a blog post every few months on "The State of the Profession" of genealogy.

What would you write about? What stories or numbers would you seek out? Who would you interview? Would you focus on scholarship? education? advocacy? money? TV shows?

Or would you firmly turn away and not do it?



Harold Henderson, "Weekend Wonderings: What Would You Write About?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Get Out of That Rut!

 Archives.com has just posted my article, "Ten Little Known Indiana Records," but the truth is that these sources are little-known, and underused, everywhere! My examples come from the Hoosier State but most of these records exist elsewhere. If I were rewriting that article today I would probably shoehorn in a mention of "local laws" from the 19th century as another example.

Genealogy learning is a constant alternation between learning about new (to us) sources, and learning new ways to use them (methodology). We need to keep doing both in order to keep growing.








 Harold Henderson, "Little Known Indiana Records," Archives.com (http://www.archives.com/experts/henderson-harold/indiana-records.html : accessed 26 July 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Get Out of That Rut!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 July 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]