Loyal Acorn: A Day in the Life

Curiosity killed the cat, but it only slows down the genealogist. Our first wood-burning stove (1974) was a quasi-antique with the quaint name "Umpire Estate," I presumed some company's attempt to sound like the nickname for New York. The other day I was checking transcribed court cases for a township in La Porte County, Indiana. In 1882, a man was being sued for unpaid bills; he had purchased two stoves, one called "Loyal Acorn."

I went right down that rabbit hole and searched on "loyal acorn" and stove. Up came an informative ad. And the excursion was actually relevant, because the printed ad revealed that I had mis-transcribed the surname of a company owner: it was Sard, not Lord.

But one mystery always leads to another: for some reason, Google thinks that the magazine containing this advertisement was volume 11 of Sanitary and Heating Age. In fact, as I paged back, it was the 29 March 1879 issue -- volume 11, yes, but of The Metal Worker: A Weekly Journal of the Stove, Tin, Plumbing, and House Furnishing Trades. Just one more reason to triple-check what we're citing.




"The 'Acorn' Line of Wood Cook Stoves," advertisement for Rathbone, Sard & Company, The Metal Worker: A Weekly Journal of the Stove, Tin, Plumbing, and House Furnishing Trades vol. 11 [number illegible], Sat. 29 March 1879, p. 5; digital image, Google Books (http://www.books.google.com : accessed 16 February 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Loyal Acorn: A Day in the Life," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New History Books

It's always fun when a new issue of the American Historical Review comes around and I pick out books published a year or more ago that I never heard of but now want to see (quotations from reviewers in the February 2013 issue):

James Joseph Buss, Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011). This sounds like a much more sophisticated version of my usual rant about how many mug books may have genealogical value while being just bad history. Reviewer John P. Bowes: "In the states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, white Americans worked over the course of a century and more to write Wyandots, Potawatomis, and others out of the landscape while crafting a narrative that 'portrayed the erasure of indigenous communities as a passive and inevitable consequence of settlement.'"

Kenneth E. Marshall, Manhood Enslaved: Bondmen in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011). The author focuses on three individuals and "finds complex men who struggled to assert their manhood in a world determined to render them as boys."

Mazie Hough, Rural Unwed Mothers: An American Experience, 1870-1950 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010). Focus on Maine and Tennessee.

Hendrik Hartog, Someday This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Focus on New Jersey court cases: "When an individual died and did not leave the caregiver the inheritance seemingly promised . . .the courts became the stage for the most personal of family dramas."

Joanna L. Grossman and Lawrence M. Friedman, Inside the Castle: Law and the Family in Twentieth Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). "A highly readable and informative overview [with] . . . endnotes that can be mined for additional information."




Harold Henderson, "New History Books," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Some Dimwit Is Going To Read My Notes!

How to keep track of your research findings so that even you can find them and figure them out in a month or a year -- that's the subject of my new article over at Archives.com, "Keeping Track on the Road to Proof." The shortest possible version: we have to take detailed notes on everything we do because "even if real life never interrupts, genealogy is still a recursive process because it is a learning process: it always involves retracing our steps."




Harold Henderson, "Some Dimwit Is Going To Read My Notes!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

That Was Constructive Criticism, You Fool!

Folks largely deplored the amount of backbiting and destructive criticism and cyber-bullying among genealogists in a brief but agonized discussion on Facebook last week. This was far from the first such discussion and I doubt it will be the last.

I am no fan of cyber-bullying, but usually my thoughts run in other directions:

(1) Anyone who thinks genealogy is bad this way should try reading nothing but political blogs and the comments thereon. We are paragons of decorum by comparison.

(2) Natural caution and some sort of Facebook etiquette dictates that no one ever name any particular individual or controversy in these discussions. (This also applies to non-genealogist friends I have on FB, who frequently post mood statements with no referents. It also applies to this post . . . but maybe not to later ones.) Since one person's cyber-bullying is another person's constructive criticism, I never quite know what we're talking about. Should I re-evaluate my own behavior? Or just enjoy re-evaluating others'?

(3) In my own genealogical life, I don't get enough criticism, constructive or otherwise. And I have a sneaking suspicion that few of us do.




Harold Henderson, "That Was Constructive Criticism, You Fool!," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 22 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

It's Gone! Now What?

Someone asked a good question following my citations webinar last week (still listenable here if you're an Illinois State Genealogical Society member): how do you deal with a situation where the image you have cited is no longer on line?

For me, and I'm sure many others, it's not an academic question. Thanks to a typically non-transparent Chicago contract negotiation, FamilySearch no longer provides images for many Cook County, Illinois, records, including this one which figures in my talk coming up in May at the National Genealogical Society conference in Las Vegas:

City of Chicago, Department of Health, Record of Death no. 2510, George Edw. Chilcote 1914; digital image, “Illinois, Cook County Deaths, 1878-1922,” FamilySearch (http://www.familysearch.org : accessed 28 September 2011), citing Family History Library microfilm 1,239,982.

Technically the citation is still accurate, as the image was there on the date of access. But it's no longer available. The index remains, but relying exclusively on indexes is no fun and bad genealogy.

I still have almost three months to make up my mind, but three -- make that four -- courses of action seem appropriate:

(1) At a minimum, add a note saying that the image is no longer available on the site, and possibly not on the internet at all.

(2) Refer to an alternative. In this case, the obvious alternative is the Cook County Clerk's site. This site does have an index and a reasonable open-records policy, but charges $15 per copy and has a notoriously incomplete index. Mr. Chilcote's 1914 death is not indexed there, so at best ordering it will be an adventure.

(3) In my case, since I downloaded the image when the opportunity was there, I can cite it as an item in my own possession, much as I would a family quilt.

(4) If you didn't download the image when the opportunity was there, you could order the microfilm and view and cite that, or view it somewhere that has the microfilm on indefinite loan, or hire someone to do so for you.

Other thoughts welcome . . .


Harold Henderson, "It's Gone! Now What?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

 

December 2012 NGS Quarterly

Well, 2012 isn't quite done yet. I just received my physical copy of the December 2012 National Genealogical Society Quarterly in the physical mail a couple of weeks ago.

Midwesterners play bit parts in this issue: a Bible record certified by the county clerk of Pope County, Illinois, and a slavecatcher getting his comeuppance in Hillsdale County, Michigan in 1839 (at least that's how the Liberator retold it; apparently that issue of the local newspaper no longer exists).

Michael Hait, co-winner of the 2011 NGS Family History Writing Contest, chronicles four generations and a century of the Maryland Ridgely family from slavery to freedom and success as professionals. In a recent post on his blog, Planting the Seeds, Michael tells the backstory of how this article came to be.

George Findlen examines duplicate records in French Canada for a baptism, a marriage, and a birth to teach a double lesson: don't rely on published abstracts, and know the customs and canon law.

Allen R. Peterson follows the border-crossing Hyde family in Cheshire and Derbyshire, England, from the 1650s to the 1820s.

James W.  Petty discusses a variety of legally required records that document enslaved and emancipated black people in Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the north.

Genealogy doesn't get better than this. The quarterly can be found in good genealogical libraries everywhere, and in your mailbox if you're a member of the National Genealogical Society.



Michael Hait, "In the Shadow of Rebellions: Maryland Ridgelys in Slavery and Freedom," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 100 (December 2012):245-66.

George L. Findlen, "Resolving Duplicate Roman Catholic Parish Register Entries: French Canadian Examples," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 100 (December 2012):267-78.

Allen R. Peterson, "Living on the Edge: A Hyde Family of Cheshire and Derbyshire, England," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 100 (December 2012):279-92.

James W. Petty, "Black Slavery Emancipation Research in the Northern States," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 100 (December 2012):293-304.

Harold Henderson, "December 2012 NGS Quarterly," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

On Wisconsin and On to FGS Fort Wayne

Cross-posted from the FGS 2013 conference news blog:

Is Wisconsin on your way to or from the 2013 FGS conference in Fort Wayne? You'll love the Badger State's hospitable research stopovers – and leave your down coat at home: August is a good time to visit.

Wisconsin Historical Society
816 State Street, Madison
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/
That's library AND archives, including pre-1907 vital records (index on line), US census agriculture schedules, and a famous newspaper collection. If have time for only one stop en route to Fort Wayne, this is it.

13 Area Research Centers
La Crosse, Platteville, Whitewater, Parkside, Milwaukee, Oshkosh, Green Bay, Stevens Point, Eau Claire, Stout, River Falls, Superior, and Ashland
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/arcnet/
Check out the map and links to localized holdings in 13 places besides Madison. (La Crosse has steamboat photographs.)

Milwaukee Public Library
814 West Wisconsin, Milwaukee
http://www.mpl.org/file/hum_genealogy.htm
Sailors in your pedigree? Check out the Great Lakes Marine Collection, including data on more than 10,000 ships: http://www.mpl.org/file/hum_marine_index.htm



Harold Henderson, "On Wisconsin and On to FGS Fort Wayne," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 17 February 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]