Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne: The Genealogist's Unofficial One-Stop Guide to the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center

I once read an article about a woman who moved to Fort Wayne in order to work on her genealogy. I know just how she felt.

When I first went to the Allen County Public Library there, my concept of genealogy consisted of photocopying lots of derivative sources and downloading what little there was on the internet. In those days the stacks were closed and you had to request items on paper slips. Now the Genealogy Center is bigger and better, with open stacks, and I'm older and less ill-informed, in part thanks to the patience of its staff.

Over the years it gradually dawned on me that this is not a normal library. It's big, it contains many unexpected resources on and off line, and to get the most out of a trip there I sometimes need to plan how to make my plan.

Which of the six catalog entry points should you start with? Books? Periodicals? Microtext? Microfilmed newspapers? Digitized Fort Wayne newspapers? The Center's own databases, including three specialized research portals?

How do you get at the mammoth collection of city directories? Or the world's best collection of genealogy periodicals? Which of its holdings may now be available on line? (And where?) No wonder some of my knowledgeable friends had trouble navigating it.

Over the years the center has produced brochures, pathfinders, and an introductory video -- and maintained generous hours and an unparalleled staff of helpful genealogists who are also librarians (or is it the other way around?). This is all good, but nothing quite gives the whole picture.

So I've tried my hand at an unofficial independent guidebook to what I think is the best all-purpose genealogy destination between Salt Lake City and the east coast. This booklet does NOT describe all the center's holdings (I'm not that crazy). It does explain how you can more efficiently find what you need -- even if you never actually manage to show up!

It comes in four parts:

• Introduction (p. 2), 

• Before You Go (p. 4), 

• When You Arrive (p. 11), and 

• Wait! There's More! (p. 25), with two appendixes that link to a 13-part blog history of the center and include some numbers showing just how far it reaches beyond its Indiana and Ohio homeland.

It's a free 26-page PDF download with live links for on-line use.

I hope it will help as you make plans -- either to attend the Federation of Genealogical Societies 2013 conference there in August, or to visit another time, or to make better use of the library's resources remotely. Let me know of corrections or potentially useful additions.



Harold Henderson, Finding Ancestors in Fort Wayne: The Genealogist's Unofficial One-Stop Guide to the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center (La Porte, IN: author, April 2013; http://www.midwestroots.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ACPLGC-April-2013.pdf).

More Indiana repositories en route to FGS 2013

[Cross-posted from the FGS 2013 blog with one typo corrected.]

Unless you fly in, you will travel through Indiana on your way to or from the 2013 FGS conference in Fort Wayne. Indiana is the only state I know of with two high-quality general genealogy magazines, and, as this suggests, the state is also full of local societies and libraries with valuable holdings. Here's a sampling, and we could run several lists like this without running out.

Willard Library
21 First Avenue, Evansville
Tri-state resources for Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky, plus an alleged ghost . . .
http://www.willard.lib.in.us/

Friends Collection and Earlham College Archives
Richmond
Extensive manuscript collections and genealogies for Quaker families and meetings.
http://library.earlham.edu/ecarchives or investigate the Willard Heiss Collection list on line.
This is one of several colleges and universities with relevant genealogy material.

Porter County Public Library
This might be the best genealogy library in northern Indiana if Fort Wayne weren't there too! Good periodical selection.
103 Jefferson Street, Valparaiso
http://www.pcpls.lib.in.us/genealogy.html

Marshall County Historical Society
123 North Michigan, Plymouth
A half-block of downtown stores repurposed as a history museum and research center, with
indexes, original records, and knowledgeable helpers.
http://www.mchistoricalsociety.org/ and see also http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~inmarsha/

Alameda McCullough Research Library
1001 South Street, Lafayette
In the Frank Arganbright Genealogy Center. An extensive collection focused on Tippecanoe County.
Admission fee. Check site for hours.
http://www.tcha.mus.in.us/library.htm

Was Your Ancestor Entered in a Better Baby Contest?

The Ultimate History Project has a brief interesting article on the mixed heritage and results of Better Baby Contests that were all the rage just about a century ago. Babies were weighed and scored on a number of supposedly scientific criteria; often there was an anti-immigrant or anti-black subtext to the movement at a time when eugenics had not yet become a dirty word.

But genealogists devour everything. These contests are another potential source of information, as contestants and winners were sometimes pictured and identified in local newspapers. The above article about a Missouri contest appeared in the Quincy (Illinois) Daily Journal in 1915 -- thanks to the Quincy Public Library's awesome newspaper archive. I have seen BBCs with pictures spread across an entire page of a small-town newspaper.



Rachel Louise Moran, "Making Perfect Children," The Ultimate History Project (http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/better-babies.html : accessed 25 March 2013).

"Additional Awards in Palmyra Round-Up," Quincy Daily Journal, (Quincy, Illinois), Thursday 23 December 1915, p. 8; digital image, Quincy Public Library Newspaper Archive (http://www.quincylibrary.org/library_resources/newspaperArchive.asp : accessed 26 March 2013).

Harold Henderson, "Was Your Ancestor Entered in a Better Baby Contest?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New Angles on Southern Indiana

Good things in the current issue of the Indiana Magazine of History take a microhistorical view and use Civil War claims records some of us have never heard of.

Edith Sarra takes a crack at telling three interrelated stories about Patoka Bottoms where Pike and Gibson counties come together -- the massive shantytowns for workers building the short-lived southern extension of the Wabash & Erie Canal, the possible Underground Railroad activities there, and the attempts to drain the bottoms in the early 20th century. One of her points is that standard-gauge historic preservation laws don't have much room for history that is not embodied in surviving buildings.

Stephen Rockenbach chronicles the July 1863 Civil War raid by Confederate John Hunt Morgan on the town of Corydon -- and how the townspeople were later victimized by their own state and federal governments, which never paid a dime in damages to the community.

Several reviews take up recent books about William Henry Harrison, whose role as a pro-slavery Indiana territorial governor was more significant than his one-month presidency in 1841.



Edith Sarra, "Troubled Crossings: Local History and the Built Environment in the Patoka Bottoms," Indiana Magazine of History 109, no. 1 (March 2013): 2-44.

Stephen Rockenbach, "'This Just Hope of Ultimate Payment': The Indiana Morgan's Raid Claims Commission and Harrison County, Indiana, 1863-1887," Indiana Magazine of History 109, no. 1 (March 2013): 45-60.


Harold Henderson, "New Angles on Southern Indiana," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History, History Everywhere

The context folder overflows:

* "Micro-history at its best" is EH.net reviewer Christina Lubinski's take on Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century. Author Andrew Popp drew on some 200 John Shaw family letters for an up-close-and-personal account of English international hardware wholesaler of the early 1800s.


* "What has changed [in the last 200 years] and what hasn't?" asks historian/blogger Dan Allosso over at The Historical Society as he wraps up his book, An Infidel Body-Snatcher and the Fruits of His Philosophy. Part of his answer is the same as my mom (and I) would have given: "Day to day life is so much easier now, that it’s hard for readers to appreciate the sheer work that went into staying alive from year to year in the early 19th century." When Civil War pension papers discuss whether a veteran could do "a full day's work," they're talking about an amount of physical labor that few if any of us could perform.


* In the New York Review of Books, Fred Anderson reviews Bernard Bailyn's The Barbarous Years, an unsparing portrait of the first 75 years of European settlement of eastern North America:

Here the years from 1600 to 1675 appear as an American nightmare of savagery, suffering, and squalor. European colonists, seeking to establish order, created "confusion, failure, violence, and the loss of civility as they sought to normalize abnormal situations and to recapture lost worlds, in the process tearing apart the normalities of the people whose world they had invaded."

Whatever the issues with this viewpoint, it's at the very least a necessary corrective to the conventional pieties of old-style genealogy. (My 8-great grandfather got his land in colonial Connecticut by participating in the 1637 expedition that burned to death hundreds of Pequot women and children in their village.) I'm ordering this one now.




Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012).

 Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (New York: Knopf, 2013).




Harold Henderson, "History, History Everywhere," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 March 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Michigan -- another reason to attend FGS 2013 in Fort Wayne

[Reposted from the FGS 2013 conference blog.]

Is Michigan on your way to or from the 2013 FGS conference in Fort Wayne? Well, if it's not, you may need to consider making a cooling northward detour. Your trip begins . . . at these libraries and archives.

Van Buren District Library
200 North Phelps, Decatur
http://www.vbrgs.org/LocalHistoryDepartment.html
A lot of library in a small package.

Western Michigan University Archives and Regional History Collections
East Hall #111, Kalamazoo
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/libraryarchives/
Library AND archives for southwestern counties.

Archives of Michigan
702 West Kalamazoo, Lansing
http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,1607,7-153-54463_19313---,00.html
Their circulars alone are worth a virtual trip:
http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,4570,7-153-54463_54475_20992---,00.html

Library of Michigan
702 West Kalamazoo, Lansing
http://www.michigan.gov/libraryofmichigan/0,2351,7-160-18635---,00.html
Multiple resources for your Michigan research even if you don't get beyond their web page.

Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library
5201 Woodward, Detroit
http://www.detroit.lib.mi.us/featuredcollection/burton-historical-collection
Over 4,000 manuscript collections, plus maps and photographs extending outward from Detroit and
deep into its multicultural past.

Genealogy education news flash...

Anyone who reads or even just tolerates this blog should check out Angela McGhie's latest posts, "Unexpected Lessons from Tom Jones" over at Adventures in Genealogy Education. based on some exchanges at the APG's Professional Management Conference on Tuesday. That is all.