Weekend Warriors Book Reviewing Edition

Christopher Capozzolo at Legal History Blog points to an interesting article, "The Art of Book Reviewing," by historian Bruce Mazlish of MIT, first published in 2001. The general points will be familiar to a reader of the relevant chapter by Elizabeth Shown Mills in Professional Genealogy, but the details and the slant are different. It had never occurred to me that professionals in history or social science get just the same amount of systematic training in how to review books as we genealogists do -- none. Make the most of it!

Portage County Wisconsin obituaries and so much more

For many archival purposes, the Wisconsin Historical Society has divided the state into 14 Area Research Centers (ARCs), where a surprising variety of records that you might only otherwise find in courthouses reside, including vital, tax, school, property, probate, cemetery, business, and other record types. Check out this overall map and pick your spot -- every center operates a little differently. If your main interest is pre-1907 vital records, there's a statewide index here.

The university library at Stevens Point appears to be especially active genealogically speaking. Among other things they maintain the Stevens Point Area Obituary Index, a collaboration between the university archives, the Portage County Public Library, and the Stevens Point Area Genealogical Society. If you find a research target therein you can request a copy ($10 for up to 5 requests, but be sure to read their terms of service carefully -- clearly they have to deal with a lot of clueless people and you don't want to be one of them). The index is said to cover the following newspapers and date ranges: Stevens Point Weekly Journal 1872-1920, Stevens Point Daily Journal 1895-1980, Stevens Point Journal 1981-, Gazette 1878-1923, Portage County Gazette 1999-, and Wisconsin Pinery 1864-1890.

BTW, after I wrote this post I received the new issue of the always excellent NGS Magazine, which contains a meaty, detailed account of Wisconsin's ARCs by native son and veteran researcher David McDonald, CG. Check it out!

The ultimate Michigan Civil War resource

You're going to be sorry your ancestors didn't all flock to Michigan to join the Union Army...

I blundered into a fantastic archival collection on line at Seeking Michigan -- digital images of original Civil War records in 1486 folders, each containing (as far as I looked) between 25 and 85 documents. According to the collection description, "The records document the history of Michigan soldiers in the form of muster rolls, letters, lists of dead, monthly returns and other materials sent to the state Adjutant General during the war. Funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission." The Library of Michigan and the Archives of Michigan and the Leota and Talbert Abrams Foundation are involved.

If you have a research target who served in a Michigan unit in the war, and you know which one, you can conduct archival research on him from your desktop. (From the lists I saw it's obvious that many men not living in Michigan saw service there.) The interface isn't ideal, but if you click on printable version, that image is much easier to navigate and very detailed.

I can't tell if this is everything, but it's enormous. It's not indexed but it is organized by unit. Folder titles are searchable so browsing is probably the way to get started. To browse this collection, hit "advanced search," in that window move "Civil War Records" from the box on the left to the box on the right," and hit search. And pretty much wherever you land you'll find a surprise. I just found a bunch of Mexican War records!

Indian men and white women in Indiana and Michigan

Two wonderful articles combine genealogical and microhistorical chronicles with deep thoughts about race and intermarriage in the Midwest. They're just out in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, unfortunately available only if you have access to an amazing bookstore, or a library that subscribes to the journal itself or to Project Muse (hat tip to the Legal History blog):

"'They Found Her and Left Her an Indian': Gender, Race, and the Whitening of Young Bear," by Jim J. Buss, historian at Oklahoma City University (volume 29, issue 2&3, page 1). It was a famous story in the 1800s -- Frances Slocum, taken from her Pennsylvania home as a young girl in the 1780s, rediscovered by her brothers some sixty years later, having made a good life as an Indian wife and mother. The story was retold not just because of its inherent fascination, but because it called into question the racist ideas that justified clearing Indians from the Midwest. Buss reviews the retellings and shows how they often describe a mixed-race society in central Indiana in 1840 even though the authors wanted to deny the possibility of any such thing. He's working on a book to be titled The Winning of the West with Words: Clearing the Middle Ground for American Pioneers. Some of the 19th-century versions are recorded at this Rootsweb site -- but keep in mind that a characteristic vice of us genealogists is to take those stories as gospel truth.

"Miengun's Children: Tales from a Mixed-Race Family," by Susan E. Gray of Arizona State University (volume 29, issue 2&3, page 146). Regular readers will recognize her as author of The Yankee West. Working with some data provided by genealogists, she tells a collective biography of the children of a Lakota man (Miengun/Payson Wolfe) and the daughter of missionaries (Mary Jane Smith), and how the children made their way in the world of the late 1800s and early 1900s -- a world that wanted to pigeonhole them either as uncivilized Indians or as civilized white people. These folks aren't as famous as Frances Slocum/Young Bear was, but their struggles in Oklahoma and northern lower Michigan may be closer to our own experience. Gray is working on a book also: Lines Descent: Family Stories from the North Country.

Migration routes New England to NE Ohio

Late last year there were several interesting posts at H-Connecticut on overland migration routes through New York state and Pennsylvania to the Western Reserve of Ohio some 200 years ago. Here's a taste, from the post by Alden O'Brien of the DAR Museum:

There were two main routes to Ohio: thru NY State on a variety of new
turnpikes, and thru Pennsylvania on the "Forbes Road". Roots and Routes
lists some published diaries c 1810 detailing travel on the Forbes road.
I hadn't encountered Roots and Routes before. They say they're
"about family history, heritage travel and more.Our idea is to
use the cultural connections, great migrations, settlements and
symbolic landscapes of North America to inform these popular
avocations and make them more meaningful."

The Source Nobody Knows

If you have a research target in Indiana during the Civil War years, and they weren't poor, the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library's Heritage Center has a source for you: the 42-reel microfilm set Indiana Internal Revenue Lists for the years 1862-1866. Yes, Virginia, there was an income tax during the Civil War (that was back when they paid for wars themselves instead of laying off the bill on future generations). I've worked with these lists a tiny bit at the Great Lakes branch of the National Archives in Chicago, and they are real records -- that is, not organized or indexed for our convenience. You need to know where your folks were and where various towns were, in order to figure out the geographical layout of the districts used. And those with little or nothing won't show up here -- it's not a census substitute.

Weekend Warriors -- My Appearances

I'll be giving an introduction to the variety of genealogy blogs (of all things) at the monthly meeting of the La Porte County [Indiana] Genealogical Society, 910 State Street, 7:15 pm Tuesday, 10 March 2009. (Yes, it's mostly ready to go, but it's never too late to offer advice in the comments.)