Good news for pre-1850 US "Dark Age" ancestors

My great-great-great grandfather Eliphas Thrall (1767-1834) did not serve in the American Revolution. But when I searched for his name in quotation marks in the "Revolutionary War Pensions" section of Fold3, I got two hits. His name and signature appear in the handwritten pension files of Daniel Baker and Jesse Thrall as a corroborating witness or neighbor in the place from which they applied for their pensions. Fold3 has the files indexed that deeply. (Exactly how thoroughly overall I don't know, but some of you may.)

For anyone suffering with Dark Age ancestors in the US, this kind of searching can be a godsend. It basically uses the pension files to garner information on people who are present in incidental or supporting roles -- and of course it connects them to friends, family, associates, and neighbors, all of whom may yield additional records. It will be more helpful if you can either (a) arrange to have research targets with unusual names or (b) manage to narrow down the search for a common-name geographically or otherwise.

I have a bunch of names to run through this mill in my "spare" time. I'm looking forward to having Civil War pension files and local probate files indexed on line in this fantastically productive way in the future.

BTW, this kind of all-purpose indexing is not a new idea. Some folks had it back before 1980 and created 23 volumes of books indexing these pension files in this way until 2006 (up into the "H" surnames, and using the abridged set of pension files, NARA M805), under the cumbersome title Revolutionary War period : Bible, family & marriage records gleaned from pension applications. 




Harold Henderson, "Good news for those pre-1850 US 'Dark Age' ancestors," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Historians' (and our?) habits of thought

The December issue of Perspectives on History, published by the American Historical Association, has a fascinating column by president Kenneth Pomeranz, who teaches at the University of Chicago. He thinks that historians have more to offer than just background knowledge about the past -- that they have ways of thinking that may be distinctive and certainly can be useful elsewhere. I'll just list them here (read the whole thing!) so that we can ask ourselves the question: How much do we think in these ways?

Historians, he says,

* add context as they add sources. (Why here? Why now? What do other sources say?)

* juxtapose a variety of materials and consider them together.

* notice how things change over time, and what difference it makes when some things change faster than others -- in other words, short-term changes and long-term changes may not move in the same direction. (Pomeranz's example is how railroads for decades actually increased the demand for horse travel.)

* consider when and how to simplify and generalize without oversimplifying.

No moral here, just food for thought.


Harold Henderson, "Historians' (and our?) habits of thought," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted  26 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Pretty good news for Kane County Illinois land researchers

Quietly, the Kane County, Illinois, Recorder's office has placed all of its deeds (and several other kinds of documents) on line. Basically this is good news but there are a few qualifiers as described in the following quickie tutorial:

(1) Few genealogists will be using the tab that says "Search Land Records" --the straightforward grantee and grantor search only works for deeds since 1980. The interface for older deeds is somewhat klunky, but structurally it's the same that we go through in person: first find promising entries in the grantee and grantor indexes, then find the deeds themselves in the deed books.

(2) The grantee and grantor indexes are reached by going to the tab "View Miscellaneous Documents," then "All Miscellaneous Documents," and then choosing "Grantee Index" (actually a whole bunch of volumes of grantee indexes) or "Grantor Index" from the resulting menu. Under "Grantee Index" there's a list of books identified by volume number and year. Pick your book and then pay attention to the, um, unique patented method that a previous recorder chose to use for indexing. (It's called "Dennick's Universal Chart System of Indexing, patented in 1893, and explained below ** as it will take a while.)

(3) Once you've found a book and page number to consult in the deed books themselves, go back to the beginning and hit the tab "Books," under that "Document Books," under that "Folders" (actually original deed books), pick the desired volume number, and then within that volume the page.

(4) Once you're there, the images are variable in quality, with many portions of pages overexposed. (In some cases you may want to transcribe from the image rather than print it out.) Many pages are missing at least one line at the bottom. I have usually found FamilySearch's deed images from other states to be of better quality.

All this said, this degree of online access is better to have than not to have. Kane County is a suburban county west of Chicago, and I'm in a suburban county southeast of Chicago. Even living that close it's cheaper to work the deeds this way than in person. And the more people who can use this option, the better the old deeds are saved from extra handling.

** The grantee and grantor indexes are each arranged under one of many supposed 19th-century improvements on the alphabetical-by-first-letter-of-surname-and-then-chronological default system. First, surnames are organized in the following 47 initial-letter-equivalent groups, each beginning with a certain number, as follows:

A 1, Ba 14, Be 27, Br 40, B 53, Ca 66, Co 79, C 92, D 105, E 118, F 131, Gr 144, G 157, Ha 170, Ho 183, H 196, I 209, J 210, K 223, L 236, Ma 249, Mo 262, M 275, Mc 288, N 301, O 314, P 327, Q 340, Ro 341, R 354, Sc 367, Sh 380, Sm 393, St 406, S 419, T 432, U 445, Va 446, Ve 447, V 448, Wa 449, Wh 462, Wi 475, W 488, Young 501, Y 502, Z 503.


Within each surname initial-letter-equivalent, given names are organized according to 13 different initial letter equivalent groups: AB, C, DE, FG, HI, Ja, Jo, J, KL, MN, OPQR, STUV, and WXYZ.

Note that in this system surnames are not in alphabetical order: Grommet will appear ahead of Garofalo because their initial-letter-equivalent groups are in that order. And within each surname letter-equivalent-group, the names are organized by given names.

I looked for Levi Goodrich in the earliest grantee index, beginning in 1837.  Since his surname starts with G (page 157), given names beginning with "L" will be found at the ninth given-name initial letter equivalent group, so 165. (One big advantage of Kane County's system is that its image numbers correspond to the original page numbers, at least where I looked.) On 165 I found an L. D. Goodrich buying property, referring to a deed at volume 35, page 511. Before going to the deed, I carefully scrolled to the bottom of the page and found that this listing was continued on page 130, where I checked for any more.

OK, he turned out to be Lewis D. Goodrich, not Levi, but those are the breaks. Good luck and good hunting!

Note: As I have learned from Michael Hait's on-line state resources book, DeKalb County has what appears to be a similar setup (in beta test and requiring login) which I have not examined in detail.


Harold Henderson, "Pretty good news for Kane County, Illinois, land researchers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 23 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

BCG revises and updates Genealogical Standards

Thirteen years ago, the best minds in genealogy, under the aegis of the Board for the Certification of Genealogists, published a manual of genealogy standards, in which they began to wean the field away from terminology like "preponderance of the evidence" borrowed from law and not specific enough for our needs.

Now some of the same best minds have revised, reorganized, updated, and published it as Genealogy Standards. The basics -- the five-part Genealogical Proof Standard -- remain the same. And the need for standards remains the same. As editor Thomas W. Jones writes, they provide "a guide to sound genealogical research and a way to assess the research outcomes that genealogists produce. They are standards for anyone who seeks to research and portray accurately people’s lives, relationships, and histories." (More from him on the changes over at Angela McGhie's blog Adventures in Genealogy Education.)

One of my favorites is Standard 39, "Information Preference":

Whenever possible, genealogists prefer to reason from information provided by consistently reliable participants, eyewitnesses, and reporters with no bias, potential for gain, or other motivation to distort, invent, omit, or otherwise report incorrect information. At the same time, genealogists understand that some preferred information items could be proved inaccurate, less desirable items might be proved accurate, or they may be the only extant relevant information items.

This is why those who seek numerically precise degrees of certainty in genealogy will always be frustrated. That kind of certainty is not available. While some sources are on average more reliable than others, there is never a guarantee. And in genealogy it's the veracity of the particular source that we're concerned about, and the best way to determine that is not to compute averages but to compare its information with that from other, independent sources. (Think of it as an elimination tournament in sports. What matters is not your or your team's past record, what matters is its performance on that occasion.)

One other important change is that we now refer to three kinds of sources (original records, derivative records, and authored works), three kinds of information (primary, secondary, and undeterminable), and three kinds of evidence (direct, indirect, and negative). These are not academic distinctions -- they make a difference in how we evaluate and use materials. But that's a story for another day.



Harold Henderson, "BCG revises and updates Genealogical Standards," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0

There's an old saying, "When you're tired of London, you're tired of life." Well, when you get tired of browsing this book, you're tired of genealogy.

Earlier this month my friend and colleague Michael Hait released the third edition of his On Line State Resources for Genealogy. It's up to 1140 pages and more than 9000 resources -- hosted at a bewildering variety of web sites, with a much deeper and different reach than the popular free and subscription mega-sites.

Contrary to the title, the book includes on-line resources at the national level including the National Archives. Some sites require sign-in. "Resources" include images of original records; derivative records (such as transcriptions and abstracts); authored works; and finding aids and indexes. As stated in the introductory material, use the finding aids and indexes and derivative sources to lead to the original records when possible.

The table of contents is arranged by state and then by repository in apparently random order within each state. A click on any entry in the table of contents takes you directly to the repository's listings, and a click on the specific repository's link takes you there.

Midwestern researchers will be interested to know that Indiana listings occupy 92 pages, Illinois 61, Ohio 46, and Michigan and Wisconsin each 14.

This undertaking is nothing less than gargantuan. And it includes resources I did not know about but should have. Still it doesn't have everything: absent are La Crosse, Wisconsin, city directories; the Monroe County, Wisconsin, Local History Room; and several name indexes available at the Chicago branch of NARA.

But as the numbers mount up this enterprise faces a deeper problem -- how to organize the resources. Not only are they proliferating daily (the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center just announced eleven new ones). Often the originating agency may be different, or in a different place, than the record itself (such as county records created and listed under the name of a state agency). Equally bothersome, it is also often difficult to discern where one repository ends and another begins, since the same collection may be reached through more than one portal. It certainly helps that this book is searchable and not in print form, but part of its value is that the resources also be rationally browseable.

This compilation is itself an essential part of a "reasonably exhaustive search" as prescribed by BCG's Genealogy Standards, but other searches need to be made both within and outside of it.

Another form of browsing is to follow the compiler's new blog featuring a resource every few days.






Michael Hait, comp., On Line State Resources for Genealogy, third edition (PDF/ebook, privately printed, 2013).


Harold Henderson, "On Line State Resources for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]







Harold Henderson, "On Line State Records for Genealogy 3.0," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Good news for Illinois AND Indiana researchers

The indefatigable Michael John Neill points us to a treasure trove of Illinois statutes at Western Illinois University, both compiled statutes and session laws.

In another part of this site I discovered a link to a publication I'd never seen, hosted at Internet Archive, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Official Publications of the Territory and State of Indiana from 1809 to 1890, originally published as Indiana Historical Society Pamphlet No. 1. The publications are listed roughly by subject matter or agency, from the Adjutant General to the War Office.

The descriptions include explanations of the often obscure bureaucracy and how it functioned at the time to produce the records we seek now. For instance, it turns out that the first two reports of the Indiana State Health Commission, in 1879 and 1880, were published in the report of the chief of the State Bureau of Statistics and Geology. These might be of interest as this was when the idea of the state of Indiana collecting birth and death information was being considered and developed and discussed. But who would have looked there?



Harold Henderson, "Good news for Illinois AND Indiana researchers ," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Digging for Ancestors: new book on using land records

Michelle Roos Goodrum. Digging for Ancestors: An In-Depth Guide to Land Records. Utica, OH: The In-Depth Genealogist, 2013. 123 pages. $9.95 Nook, Kindle, or PDF; $29.95 paperback.

Most genealogists don't use land records enough. Most genealogy bloggers don't talk about them enough. And few practical books for beginners focus on them exclusively.

The folks at The In-Depth Genealogist have been doing something about all of these problems, first by publishing regular posts on these records, and now by helping contributor Michelle Roos Goodrum compile and augment the posts into book form for wider distribution. The hope is that this "will motivate the reader to take the necessary steps to utilize their ancestors land records." (page 1, image 8)

Land-record newbies can learn plenty from this book, not just from what it says about the records, but also from the author's visible enthusiasm and positive attitude toward indirect evidence, cluster research, and the Genealogical Proof Standard. Readers will also appreciate its direct and informal style (which carries over from blogging). Best of all are its step-by-step illustrated explanations of how to extract information from particular land records, which occupy about half of the book.

Unfortunately, the book may miss the mark with some readers because the material is poorly organized. It also lacks enticement, overview, information for state-land states, and any mention of what remains the best place to start learning about US land records: the late Sandra Hargreaves Luebking's 65-page chapter in The Source, third edition, available in print and on line at Ancestry.com's wiki.


Newcomers to land records often find them intimidating; I know I did. (They're so -- detailed!) Therefore a book about them needs to give the reader

(a) an incentive to dive in, such as a few quick examples of why land records are worth the trouble, and

(b) a brief clear overview, so that the reader gets some sense of control and won't be constantly surprised.

Instead, Digging for Ancestors begins with ten research tips -- good advice, but only three of the ten have to do with land records. The first chapter follows up by telling how important and complicated land records are, with a list of eleven rather bewildering ways in which land might be transferred. Technical terms (such as "grantor," "grantee," or "aliquot") are used before they are defined. No larger context is provided, either historical (the importance of property ownership from the beginnings of settlement) or logistical (the two main kinds of land descriptions).

The book covers only 30 states. It offers little to those researching in New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Maine, Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, Alaska, or Hawaii. These 20 states or their colonial powers provided original grants of land, and land parcels there are usually described using the metes-and-bounds system, as opposed to the other 30 "federal land" states that usually describe land using the rectangular survey system.

Readers will benefit from the author's decision to explain the practice of transcribing deeds, and to show the use of methods old and new -- transcription and GoogleEarth -- in analyzing them. The book's strongest parts are the step-by-step examinations of a land case, a homestead file, and a bounty-land file. Choice of other subtopics seems a little random -- why a chapter on cemetery deeds rather than, say, mortgages? -- but the subject is endless and one has to stop somewhere.

The list of resources would be improved by annotations. (Newcomers are likely to learn more from Val Greenwood than from E. Wade Hone.) It could also be supplemented by mention of

* Elizabeth Shown Mills's short and straightforward 1995 article, "Analyzing Deeds for Useful Clues," on the BCG web site;

* the blog In Deeds, which has been all-land-records-all-the-time for more than five years; and

* a few outstanding journal articles that show successful use of land records, such as Karen Green and Birdie Monk Holsclaw's contribution to the June 2012 NGS Quarterly.

Lesser issues: Some of the transcriptions shown don't distinguish between the preprinted and the handwritten portions of the forms being transcribed. Neither of the two separate discussions of searching for names on the BLM web site mentions that it allows use of wild-card search terms. For comparing monetary values between years Measuring Worth would be a better choice than The Inflation Calculator. Ideally PDF image numbers would coincide with page numbers, and apostrophes would be used properly. The original land records now appearing on FamilySearch might have been mentioned, as they offer unprecedented access and pose unique issues for researchers.



Harold Henderson, "Digging for Ancestors: New book on using land records," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 12 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]