IGHR Samford Day 2

Today's high points included being (re)introduced to legal research in general and to the law library of the Cumberland Law School here at Samford. It's a beautiful building with a circuitous entrance and generous long hours. It's full of reporters, digests, session laws, statutes at large, legal encyclopedias, legal journals, microtext, and even some regular books -- headed by a kindly reference librarian with degrees in both law and librarianship. We will see more tomorrow, spurred on by several research problems posed by our Course 6 instructors.

In the evening, Tom Jones and Elissa Powell headed up a seminar/discussion on the BCG certification process for those who are interested or who might be. Several of us spoke on why we applied, how we applied, and why some of us didn't succeed on our first try. I think some fun and information were had by all. (Don't submit the first one you do of anything!)

Many of my cohort stayed up too late talking last night and are now just a bit brain-dead, but that's part of the experience too. The weather has been more clement than average, so far. We hear good reports of Thursday night's banquet speaker. If you prefer your news from here in visual form, do check out Maddy McCoy's photo blog at Historic Wanderings.


Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 2," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

IGHR Samford Day 1

Co-coordinator Ann Carter Fleming walked our class, Course 6, through the wonderful overlapping world of government documents, and then set us some puzzles to solve with them. Government documents (that is, those authored and published by the government) just don't behave like many other documents of genealogical interest. Only in some new on-line incarnations are they even indexed by name. But even to blunder around creatively you need to understand the landscape, which is complicated. Searches in print indexes by subject and geographic location sometimes work well. I found out personally that searching hopefully in a document that my ancestor or an associate might have been involved in does not work so well, but I am told that it does sometimes. That kind of uncertainty is a familiar quantity in genealogy.

What was most apparent from Fleming's lectures and from our own searching and browsing is that a great many things turn up in government documents that normal people would never expect to see. Would you like a nice list of neighbors in between censuses? Look for the record of a contested election!

Samford's library is a good place to have this class. The library affords quite a bit of choice in searches: at least two physical approaches to the Serial Set, and maybe as many as half a dozen on-line avenues.

Tomorrow we have a phase change, and it's all aboard for the law library . . .  I am reminding myself that "statutes at large" does not refer to a jailbreak by a bunch of Michelangelo sculptures!



Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 1, " Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 11 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

IGHR Samford Day 0, resting briefly in the shade

If you've been to IGHR (the week-long Institute for Genealogical and Historical Research) at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, you don't need my description. And if you haven't been there, you may not understand it when I call it a cross between a conference and a homecoming, in which the party comes the evening before the work begins.

For me, the advent is a two-day car trip, this year solo. Saturday I stopped off at the Indiana State Library and wound up hitting almost every research target I aimed at. (More on that later.) Sunday I drove and listened to recordings of talks given by Tom Jones and Elizabeth Shown Mills at the National Genealogical Society conference last month. Tom managed to condense documentation into five questions and then into two basic principles; Elizabeth laid out a plan for organizing research so that you won't have to go back and do it over. I need to recheck the syllabus material in order to get the most out of them.

And there was no time for that once I arrived on the hillside campus, what with getting registered, getting settled, greeting friends old and new, telling newcomers where to go next (it's my fourth year here so I can pass for an old-timer), checking out the used books for sale in the library, and even selling a few of my wife's heavy-duty coffee mugs emblazoned with trees.

Debra Hoffman filled in ably for the absent ProGen Study Group leader Angela McGhie at the study group reunion and recognition. Afterwards the conversation devolved into small groups. Mine got into stories and advice about writing genealogical articles, and we were far from the last to leave.

Director Lori Northrup borrowed the best line of the evening when she quoted Samford's president: "We rest in the shade of trees we did not plant." At the end of a long day that's a good thought to mull over in the calm before the storm of genealogical activity set to begin at 8 am sharp Monday morning.


Harold Henderson, "IGHR Samford Day 0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Weekend wonderings: footnoting the fun stuff?

A brief but lively discussion on the Transitional Genealogists Forum provokes me to ask how others manage to write something "light" and informal (say, for a family reunion) without risking being professionally embarrassed because it might leave sources uncited or some problems unplumbed. The issue is sharp, because the internet and social media make it easy for something written in one context to be transposed into another, where it may no longer be obvious that it was an informal or "occasional" piece of work. I can think of some finesses, but really, can we have it both ways?



Harold Henderson, "Weekend wonderings: footnoting the fun stuff?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Top Five MWM Posts for February-March 2012

The people's choices during February and March on this blog:

1. Another angle on professionalism (March 14)

2. How to prove parents without direct evidence (March 8)

3. Good news for Chicago genealogists (March 20)

4. Resources: Chicago Examiner (February 7)

5. Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy's new milestone (February 1)



Harold Henderson, "Top Five MWM Posts for February-March 2012," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 9 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Drainage tile, anyone?

You never know when history is going to happen to you. I went outside the other morning and started clearing up a junk corner my wife and I had targeted for extinction. One item I picked up was a hollow burnt-orange cylinder with walls about half an inch thick -- a drainage tile.

It's very easy not to know what a huge role this piece of ceramic hardware played in the process of turning the often-swampy Midwestern prairie into productive farms connected by actual roads. Not only did it require the technology of creating standardized tile (these days I think they use continuous rolls of corrugated flexible black plastic), but the laws and organization necessary to create drainage districts, because the process won't work unless all the neighbors agree on it.

Tile was just as essential, but less charismatic or conspicuous than barbed wire, because once the fields are drained there's nothing to see. But eastern Illinois, western Indiana, and northwestern Ohio (just to name the parts I'm personally familiar with) would look entirely different if our ancestors and relatives hadn't participated in this process.

This process was not without controversy, then or now. A diverse prairie ecosystem was destroyed and replaced by what are now monocultures of corn and soybeans, dependent on annual doses of oil and chemicals to produce high yields. (In some places those once universally despised swamps are being re-created.)

Law professor James E. Herget wrote a thorough legal account in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society back in 1978; Englishman Hugh Prince's 1997 book Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes, at least part of which is available on a German offshoot of GoogleBooks, is more wide-ranging and even-handed.

How much have people used drainage district records in genealogy? Well, it's not unheard of. The Illinois State Archives holds some such records, and some relevant court records have been abstracted on US GenWeb for Stoddard County, Missouri. I'd love to hear more if anyone has gone beyond staring at an old piece of clay tile.



James E. Herget, "Taming the Environment: The Drainage District in Illinois," Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society vol. 71, no. 2 (May 1978):107-118; digital image, Northern Illinois University Libraries Illinois Historical Digitization Project, "Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society," [1950-2006] (http://dig.lib.niu.edu/ISHS/ : accessed 4 June 2012).

Hugh Prince, Wetlands of the American Midwest: A Historical Geography of Changing Attitudes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Harold Henderson, "Drainage tile, anyone?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 8 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Are you On Board?

Arguably the thrice-yearly newsletter of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists, OnBoard, has the highest information per ounce of any genealogy publication. In the current (May) issue it's Tom Jones 1, "source snobbery" 0; and Stefani Evans shows just how closely we can analyze even a derivative source.

You do not need to be certified in order to subscribe, and a subscription also supports an organization crucial to maintaining and advancing genealogy research standards.

If you don't have $15 to spare, or aren't sure, check out the generous sampling of articles published 1995-2010 under "Skillbuilding" on the BCG web site. Whatever our level of research, reading these short articles will make us better.





Thomas W. Jones, "Perils of Source Snobbery," OnBoard, vol. 18 no. 2 (May 2012):9-10, 15.



Harold Henderson, "Are you On Board?" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]