Kosciusko County and Many Other Maps On Line

Dick Eastman broadcast a nice local digital newspaper story about the Kosciusko County, Indiana, Historical Society placing grave listings and photographs on line as part of the county's GIS mapping system for properties.

But there's more to the story: The web site is part of a multi-county service called Beacon: Local Government GIS for the Web. Kosciusko and 26 other Indiana counties also have multi-purpose zoomable GIS maps and searchable information on current properties under this format. Four counties in Illinois (Cass, Morgan, Ogle, and Whiteside), one in Michigan (Berrien), and several in Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, South Carolina, and South Dakota also have this feature. So far as I've been able to tell, Kosciusko is the only place going the extra mile with the cemetery database and images bonus. (So it is now possible to cross-check these against other on-line listings such as Find a Grave, as well as non-digital published readings.)

Just click on the "All States" drop-down menu and pick your favorite state and county (if available) and spend some time with the maps. They don't have all the features genealogists would want by any means, but they have a lot.


Harold Henderson, "Kosciusko County and Many Other Maps On Line," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 7 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Lost Causes in NGSM

Were your ancestors supporters of Prohibition? Did they regard World War II as a bad idea? Lost causes can be genealogical opportunities (they created records too). And seeing the world as these folks saw it can remind us that history did not have to turn out the way it did. Check out my article in the new NGS Magazine.




Harold Henderson, "Lost Causes as Genealogical Opportunities," NGS Magazine 38, no. 4 (October-December 2012):23-26.


Harold Henderson, "Lost Causes in NGSM," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Back Door to Chicago

Most genealogy societies have been around long enough that they have a significant amount of history, including a written trail of published research results, queries, and transcriptions. Many local periodicals are not indexed. Many are indexed by surname only (making researchers of names like Smith or Jones apoplectic). Many are indexed one issue, or one year, at a time. And then you have to find those indexes.

Fortunately there is a trend to digitize these potential clue factories. Thanks to the Newberry Library and the Chicago Genealogical Society, the Chicago Genealogist now has volumes 1 through 39 (1969-2007) on line and searchable.

Anyone who might have Chicago people should check it out (and then you'll be happier, but as far behind on your day as I am!). But if you're looking for my piece on a Civil War letter from Samuel Lowe, son of Cook County's first sheriff, it's still too recent, but you can read it here.

And speaking of urban research, the front door is open in Pittsburgh, where Historic Pittsburgh has an impressive run of early directories. They are not fully covered in my usual go-to reference, United States On Line Historical Directories.



Harold Henderson, "The Back Door to Chicago," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 5 November 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 September 2012

Once again it's time for the monthly popularity contest, listing the most-viewed blog posts made during September. Time permitting, I'll report on October in early December when the dust of that month will have settled.

September was unusual in one way, and typical in another. Usually the most-read posts have to do with genealogy standards and related questions. In September my five-part non-authoritative and non-official series on how to choose which projects to submit in a BCG portfolio swept the top five spots: part 1 introducing the discussion, part 2 on the document work, part 3 on the client report, part 4 on the complex-evidence case study, and part 5 on the kinship determination project (complete with a correction).  The next-ranking posts were not close.



Harold Henderson, "Top Five MWM Posts for September 2012," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 4 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Wonderful Wisconsin and a Warning

I haven't spent enough research time in Wisconsin in the past three years, and a long day trip earlier this week was a partial make-up. Because I was mainly doing lookups for an article I was able to cover a lot of ground -- three counties' registers of deeds plus the state archives and library in Madison. (I was reminded why Dave McDonald has made a case that the Wisconsin Historical Society is the #2 genealogy repository in the country, not that I am either equipped or inclined to adjudge the matter.)

Everyone I met in the various offices was kind and helpful, and they have a good institutional framework within which to work. I especially appreciate Wisconsin's openness with vital records. They are in the custody of the county registers, rather than the health departments. Copies are costly but the information is available within reason.

In my absence from Madison, the bound volumes of the agricultural schedules of 19th-century US censuses have moved upstairs from the library to the archives. That means more exercise (good news) and an earlier closing time (not such good news). And that gets to my warning. In examining Waushara County for 1860, I learned two facts that had escaped me years ago. One is that the census taker often changed jurisdictions or left off for the day in mid-page, labeling those points. The other is that the pages for some reason were not bound in the numerical order the census taker gave them. As a result, farms in Richford Township appear on four different pages (I believe) in three different locations in this small county.

Perhaps this was the only county so treated. (I don't know; I was doing well to leave five minutes before closing time as it was.) But if you're working with these books -- or with any microfilmed or future on-line version -- be very careful. It would be easy to miss some of the deceased farmers that you were seeking.



Photo from the photostream of wackybadger (Joshua Mayer) per Creative Commons
(http://www.flickr.com/photos/wackybadger/4355029933/ : accessed 2 November 2012)

Harold Henderson, "Wonderful Wisconsin and a Warning," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

We'll Always Need Advanced Genealogy Education

Stanford historian Sam Wineburg, interviewed by Randall Stephens over at The Historical Society blog, explains another reason why good classes in evidence evaluation, analysis, and correlation are unlikely ever to become unnecessary. Even today, even the best students are not learning this stuff.

Wineburg describes how he uses a popular book that many history students (but few professional historians) love, the late Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States 1492-Present.

Please note (as some of the commenters on the original post do not) that the issue here is not whether Zinn's claims are true/false/absurd/other, nor whether his book on balance has value, but how to think about any historical claims. If you know the book you probably have an opinion on those questions too; please share it elsewhere.

I have students take a claim and then follow the chain of evidence for it back to its source. This is not easy with Zinn, as the book contains no footnotes. So, we have to figure out where Zinn gets his information by looking at his bibliography (there is no archival research in the book—all of Zinn's references are to secondary sources). So, I have students go back to the books Zinn read, and then have them go to the notes in these books to try to figure out how Zinn has used this information and whether its original context has been preserved.

This course is part of Stanford's freshmen seminar program, so my students are young people who only months before had been in high school. They have never experienced anything like this before. Nearly all of them are survivors of AP history, where history class meant memorizing copious amounts of factual information to do well on the 80 multiple choices items so they could get into a college like Stanford. . . . Students know how to find information but many are ill-equipped to answer whether that information should be believed in the first place.

Sound familiar? From our point of view, the roots of genealogical malpractice run deep.

Randall Stephens, "Teaching History to Undergrads: An Interview with Sam Wineburg,"The Historical Society, posted 29 October 2012 (http://histsociety.blogspot.com/2012/10/teaching-history-to-undergrads.html : accessed 30 October 2012).

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States 1492-Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1980-2003).


Harold Henderson, "We'll Always Need Advanced Genealogy Education," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 2 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Disasters Are Part of Genealogy, Too

Kimberly Powell, blogging at About.com, lists the ten deadliest US disasters (and the most lethal is not the most famous -- sorry, Galveston), with some great related resources on each. Less systematic but also worth checking out is the aggregator site Gen Disasters: Events That Touched Our Ancestors' Lives. Even though its home page appears to have gone away, you can browse by state or by disaster type.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dedhed1950/8136458074/, from dedhed1950's photostream per Creative Commons



Harold Henderson, "Disasters Are Part of Genealogy, Too," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]