FGS Day Two (Thursday August 30)

High points of the day:

Waking up late on a day when I didn't have any early-morning commitments.

Talking with people about BCG certification at the booth.

Hearing Warren Bittner's awesome historical AND genealogical talk on illegitimacy in Germany in the 1810s and 1820s (AKA "Bittner's Bavarian Bastards"), in which his paternal-line ancestor was denied the right to marry for a decade, essentially because he was poor. No wonder American looked good.

What with committee work and other commitments, I don't get to attend all the lectures I would like, but this one was almost worth the price of admission by itself.


Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Two (Thursday August 30)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day One (Wednesday August 29)

A many-faceted day in which I attended Jay Fonkert's stellar talk on local society newsletters and journals. One radical lesson: don't publish because "we've always done it." Figure out if your publications fit your society's goals.

I learned that there is no air-conditioning in the exhibit hall during setup, but somehow managed to help set up the BCG booth anyway.

Michael Hait and I practiced our two-man talk (or is it a comedy routine?) on how NOT to get certified.

I learned that downtown Birmingham isn't terribly friendly to pedestrians, but nevertheless took two walks there for lunch and dinner. You'd never know from the weather here that New Orleans is drowning.



Harold Henderson, "FGS Day One (Wednesday August 29)," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

FGS Day Zero (Tuesday August 28): Save The Records!

If you sit down at a table near the Federation of Genealogical Societies registration booth in the Birmingham convention center, eventually everyone in the (genealogy) world will come by. In the course of the day I learned about certain early Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, probate records that are stored inaccessibly somewhere in "the mines" (presumably old coal mines), and about lumber companies in Mississippi tearing up whole cemeteries without a peep from cowed legislators.

Which pretty well set the stage for the Association of Professional Genealogists' usual Tuesday-night pre-conference roundtable on access to records and the "art of advocacy." Organized by Diane Gravel (New England) and chaired by Thomas MacEntee (Illinois), four knowledgeable panelists discussed how genealogists can deal with rampant misinformation about open records and then go on to advocate for:
(1) the preservation of records,
(2) open access to them, and
(3) adequate funding for the repositories that manage and maintain them.

Panelists were Alvie Davidson, CG (sm) (Florida), Teri Flack (Texas), Polly Kimmitt, CG (sm) (Massachusetts) and Kelvin L. Meyers (Texas).

The panelists took turns answering pre-set questions from the chair. Teri added a note of cheer in telling the tale of a Texas Court Records Task Force that led to a great improvement in record preservation and openness in the state (not spearheaded by genealogists but by judges, if I remember right). The panelists agreed that in the year 2017 genealogists will still be fighting over these three records issues -- and if we aren't, the results will be not be good. APG will be doing more work along these lines -- meaning ultimately that its members will be.

And in doing so we'll need to make friends and alliances with other groups that have similar interests, and find ways to dramatize their importance. Librarians have "Banned Books Week." What could we do to put "No Records Week" in the headlines? A visual representation of the 55 million Texas records unprocessed and unidentified for lack of funding? A story of a family of siblings reunited because Illinois recently opened its adoption records? Your idea here . . .



Harold Henderson, "FGS Day Zero (Tuesday August 28): Save the Records!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Lincoln, Illinois, a century ago, in William Maxwell's eyes

I've been rereading one of my favorite books of any kind, William Maxwell's Ancestors. I am endlessly impressed by the imaginative sympathy he brings to his ancestors' lives. He also remembers his own past. He grew up in a small downstate Illinois town in Logan County about a century ago, as I did in a smaller one about half a century later.

Lincoln was not a typical small town, because there is no such thing, any more than there is a typical human being . . . . You could be eccentric and still not be socially ostracized. You could even be dishonest. But you could not be openly immoral. The mistakes people made were not forgotten, but if you were in trouble somebody very soon found out about it and was there answering the telephone and feeding the children. Men and women alike appeared to accept with equanimity the circumstances (on the whole, commonplace and unchanging) of their lives in a away that no one seems able to do now [1971] anywhere. This is how I remember it. I am aware that Sherwood Anderson writing about a similar though smaller place saw it quite differently. I believe in Winesburg, Ohio, but I also believe in what I remember. {188, 190}

I find it interesting that he does not mention Sinclair Lewis and Main Street -- perhaps because of Lewis's insistence that all small towns were the same kind of death trap, or perhaps because Lewis's style was crude compared to Maxwell's own ability to recall details and form them into a mosaic, not to build a case or prove a thesis, but just to see again what was there.


William Maxwell, Ancestors: A Family History (New York: Vintage, 1971).


Harold Henderson, "Lincoln, Illinois, a century ago, in William Maxwell's eyes" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

When genealogy gets personal

Recently participants in the Transitional Genealogists Forum have discussed various situations where their work has been made unwelcome. We weren't talking about indifference here, but outright hostility and fear from a client's relative, or a client's spouse, or your own relative -- people who actually objected to their family tree being researched.

Responses varied considerably based on the details of the situation and the temperament of the researcher -- ranging from dropping the research altogether, keeping it confidential, not using the objectors' information, publishing no information on living people (duh), or forging ahead.

It was pretty obvious that aside from generalities like the Golden Rule, there is no bright line to follow. It was also pretty obvious that this is no joke. I know of one individual who took up genealogy and learned more than s/he ever wanted to know about a close relative, and as a result became vehemently opposed to the pursuit. Imagine that person's response if the knowledge had been pressed on her by an irrepressible genealogist!

What we have a right to do may not always be the right thing to do . . . either for us personally or for the profession as a whole. The Association of Professional Genealogists' code of ethics requires members to "promote the trust and security of genealogical consumers," which could easily be read to include their freedom to be non-consumers as well.

This is not usually an issue for historians, as far as I know. One reflective Midwestern blogger refers to genealogy as "the personal past." That's what makes it interesting . . . and difficult sometimes -- because live people are involved too.



Harold Henderson, "When genealogy gets personal," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Updated list of presentations

I've uploaded my latest brochure of presentations (known as "lectures" to those of us of a certain age) over at Midwest Roots. Paper copies (again for those of us of a certain age) will be available at the Genealogical Speakers Guild table at FGS conference in Birmingham, Alabama, this coming week. Mainly I'm about records, research, writing, and education, but with a twist. I'm also about the proof argument from hell, spiral staircases, and the genealogy police.



Harold Henderson, "Updated list of presentations," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Hait's Online Resources

The second and greatly expanded edition of Online State Resources for Genealogy is now available (more than twice the repositories and more than triple the links), compiled by my friend and colleague Michael Hait, CG.

Like many good ideas, it seems a wonder nobody thought of it sooner: to collect all the (relatively) small free state and local on-line sources of information and original records that do not show up on Ancestry or FamilySearch. This edition runs from the Alabama Department of Archives and History's "Alabama Loose Records Index" to the Campbell County, Wyoming, Public Library System's "Local History Index." In between, I find Illinois with 21 repositories in 43 pages, Indiana with 17 repositories in 44 pages, Michigan with 9 repositories in 9 pages, Ohio with 23 repositories in 27 pages, and Wisconsin with 9 repositories in 14 pages.

When your work takes you to an unfamiliar state, this will be a comforting companion -- and a jumping-off place, because no compilation of this kind is ever complete.


Michael Hait, compiler, Online State Resources for Genealogy, version 2.0, PDF e-book (N.p.: Michael Hait Family History Research Services, 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Hait's Online Resources," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]