Where I'll be speaking this spring

My spring talks are all in Ohio! There's plenty of time yet to register for these conferences, but beware: do not under any circumstances confuse April with May, or confuse the city beginning with "C" in the upper-right-hand corner of the state with the one in the lower-left-hand corner.

Friday, April 13, 1 pm, at the Ohio Genealogical Society meeting in Cleveland, on "The Other Midwestern Archives." Some less well-known places to research once you've exhausted the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center, the Newberry Library, and the Wisconsin State Historical Society, or they've exhausted you.

Friday, May 11, 9:30 am, at the National Genealogical Society meeting in Cincinnati, on the records of the Indianapolis Orphan Asylum (1851-1941) held at the Indiana Historical Society. If you're missing a Hoosier in this time period who might have been orphaned, or just had a family living on the edge, these records may be just what you're looking for. And the stories alone would break a stone's heart.

Saturday, May 12, 9:30 am, NGS again, on "Indirect Evidence: What To Do When You Don't Have Perry Mason on Your Side." Nine relatively simple cases show what indirect evidence can do for us if we look for it with the right attitude. If you are hungering for complex cases, take that hour off and read the latest NGSQ instead ;-)

Compared to Rootstech, I would say that these two conferences overall offer more meat for intermediate and advanced genealogists (and better quality control), and less for developers and advanced techies. YMMV.

Genealogy done right -- NYGBR edition

How do you tell apart two people from more than 200 years ago named Joseph Chaplin who both had parents Joseph and Sarah and who both married women named Abigail?

If you're a 19th-century genealogist or a 21st-century beginner, you just mash together the first plausible-looking match that comes to hand.

If you're Susan Farrell Bankhead, however, you:

(a) learn the names of their children and stepchildren, and who they each married,

(b) find the estate record of one Joseph's widowed and childless sister, and

(c) match her heirs (nieces and nephews) with known children and stepchildren who belong to one Joseph and not the other.

In other words, you research the whole family, including people who on the face of it seem unlikely to have any record that would help in your single-minded quest.

This is an extremely condensed and simplified version of Bankhead's article, "Joseph and Daniel Chaplin of the Town of Virgil, Cortland County, New York," the first part of which was published in the new (January) New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. But the point is still good. Skipping over all those pesky siblings and stepsiblings would just be building your own Chaplin brick wall.

And of course I was happy to see that one of Joseph and Sarah's children ended up in Avon, Union Township, Fulton County, Illinois, my home county!

Where the Archives.com articles are

Quite a number of genealogists have written articles for Archives.com; I enjoyed Claudia Breland's recent post on "Essential Records You Won't Find Online." The current article by Sarah More on St. Lawrence County, New York, records includes many links to the locations of records that are also not online.

Some authors at Archives.com have written more than two articles, but the display on the site includes only two, and does not make it obvious that there might be more. If you read one and want to see more by that person, click through to their author information for a full list. Here are my four to date:

"Indirect Evidence to the Rescue," 25 August 2011

"Genealogy & Property Records," 15 September 2011

"Genealogical Resources for Indiana," 8 November 2011

"Climbing the Spiral Staircase: Learning Genealogy," 12 January 2012

Resources: Everywhere West!

The Newberry Library has Everywhere West: Preserving and Enhancing Access to the Records of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company. The site includes an informative blog; project manager Alison Hinderliter recently posted about using CB&Q land records to track a Swedish immigrant in Iowa. The collection itself covers a wide variety of corporate records from 1840 to 1965 and occupies more than half a mile of shelf space.

My idea of a good citation to a particular non-digitized item in the collection (subject to revision if I ever get to work with it!): Axel Frisk, Application to Buy Land In Iowa no. 2978, Montgomery County, 8 April 1874; volume [not known], series 752.4, Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Company Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago.

Comment: This project would not have happened without a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And that in turn would not have been possible if the CB&Q land records had not been recalled from Harvard University's Baker Library in 1946 and placed at the Newberry instead. For those who don't know, Baker explicitly excludes all genealogists as non-scholars. I trust that those choosing where to donate money and historic papers will treat that institution as it treats them.

Resources: Chicago Examiner

The Chicago Public Library has digitized much of William Randolph Hearst's Chicago Examiner (1908-1918). The format may take some getting used to, and the presentation is heavily image-oriented, but the digitized text is searchable. (Hat tip: Internet Scout Report.) Check out the library's other collections while you're there.

My idea of a good citation to this source: "Article," Chicago Examiner, Tuesday 30 February 1912, p. 2, col. 2; digital image, Chicago Public Library (http://www.chipublib.org/images/examiner/index.php : accessed 30 February 2012).

Comment: Thoughtful researchers will keep in mind that early 20th-century journalism was at least as unprofessional as early 21st-century journalism, but in different ways. In plain language, if Hearst published an item of information, it may well have been false or sensationalized or both.

Oldest Chicago by David Witter reviewed

High-school teacher and freelance writer David Anthony Witter has just published Oldest Chicago (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2011). You may have seen the sad, beautiful book Lost Chicago, commemorating many buildings destroyed over the years. Witter's book could be called Not Lost Yet Chicago.

This is not a book of genealogy, and its historical assertions aren't sourced, but it's a great place for either a visitor or an oblivious native to catch the bug of learning about the past by visiting seemingly ordinary places and institutions that carry it on.

The book has a simple premise -- 66 short takes on Chicago's oldest church, oldest house, oldest business, oldest park, and so forth, including the suburbs -- and it's easily read in short bites as we often do these days. Each oldest place also gets a sidebar about its neighborhood. This is a back-pocket book, not a coffee-table book. If you're around Chicago researching and the repositories are closed, you'll want it handy.

You can get technical with some of the entries. The city's supposedly oldest restaurant -- Daley's Restaurant at 893 East 63rd Street -- was founded in 1892, but it turns out to have been shut down and had no building for five years during the Great Depression (p. 83). The book's aesthetics are time-bound: Witter waxes sentimental about dated commercialism (the giant dancing hot dogs at Superdawg up at 6363 North Milwaukee, from 1948), but doesn't care for current versions (pp. 196, xiv).

When I was growing up, everything in Chicago seemed ancient (nothing much had gone up during the Depression and World War II). Now, at least parts of the city are thriving, and it's interesting to see that Witter found a diner, bar, ice-cream place, and movie house in the suburbs -- each one older than its counterpart within the Chicago city limits.

Witter is also good on chronicling the ironies of history: Chicago's oldest cemetery, Oak Woods at 1065 E. 67th, houses a mass grave of 6,000 Confederate soldiers and sailors who died at the "crowded hell hole" of Camp Douglas. Also prominent in the same cemetery are many distinguished African Americans, including Harold Washington and Jesse Owens, who might have been born into slavery if those Confederates had had their way (p. 20-21).

Many stories follow a familiar pattern of twentieth-century decline followed by revival of the lucky few. Chicago's oldest church building houses St. Patrick's, center of a once-busy immigrant parish that bottomed out at 4 members in 1983 (p. 25).

Similarly, Merz Apothecary at 4716 North Lincoln was founded by a German family in 1875, and seemed destined for oblivion when the last member of the third generation prepared to retire in 1972. "The store was ready to close when pharmacist Abdul Qaiyum walked in after hearing about it from his German in-laws" (p. 66). Sometimes the preservation of the old depends on a city's being open to groups of people who are new.

Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy's new milestone

Last week's 2012 one-week session of the Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy saw the completion of the first iteration of a new kind of advanced genealogy education. Five top people in the field, all credentialed, each presented an unpublished problem that they had solved, provided some of the evidence, and challenged their students to piece together the same puzzle.

Faculty were Kory L. Meyerink, Thomas W. Jones, Karen Mauer Green, David Ouimette, and Jim Ison, with Angela McGhie coordinating. The problems were all over the map, including immigrants from Germany, France, and Quebec. Diehard Midwesterners were pleased to find that one ranged all over the heartland.

The methods involved were equally various and intricate; nowhere have I seen the details of the research process probed as thoroughly as here. The problems were hard and the time was short with a new problem given every day. I can't give particulars, as we were sworn to secrecy, but at least one of the five will soon be published.

Even though everyone agreed that it was more important to approach the problem right than to solve it, few of us could avoid wanting to work all hours and race to the finish . . . which is not a research strategy, or at least not a good one. Even those of us who suffered hours of frustration in the library and on the internet enjoyed the give-and-take in the classes afterwards, where we could discuss exactly what worked and what didn't.

The course will be offered again at SLIG 2013, with new problems. Anyone who has taken an advanced methods course, or has experienced the equivalent, should give it some thought -- and be sure to get plenty of sleep the week before! (And if you want a day-by-day story of such a course, check out Susan Farrell Bankhead's blog posts on Jones's advanced course this year.)