Simon and Elizabeth James in OGSQ

Simon James (1771-1822) could dig a grave, weave a piece of cloth, preach a good Baptist sermon -- and, when necessary, wrestle a ghost into submission. On his way from Wales to Pennsylvania to Ohio, he learned how to prosper in frontier real estate: buy land, subdivide it, and sell the subdivisions. But the formula never worked for him.

You can read more about my favorite ancestor in the Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly 57(4):353-63 (Winter 2017). (Ohio Genealogical Society members can read it on line.) He is my maternal grandfather's great-grandfather. He had thirty grandchildren and I hope to be writing about them later. His children married into the following families: Owens, Blackmer, Foos, Gosnell, Aye, Jacobs, and Thrall.

Good news for Ohio researchers: two lifetimes of newspapers!

These may not be news to you, but they're new to me and in a quick look I didn't find them in Michael Hait's compendium Online State Resources for Genealogy 3.0, nor on James Marks's The Ancestor Hunt:

Newspapers for Johnstown, Licking County, Ohio, have been digitized and are searchable 1884-1987. If you're close enough to wonder, Johnstown is in the northwest quarter of the county, near the Franklin and Delaware County line.

Likewise the Grove City Record in southwestern Franklin County, 1927-2011 with eight outliers in 1908.




Harold Henderson, "Good news for Ohio researchers," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 May 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Not everything burned -- partitions and mortgages in Licking County, Ohio

I'm fond of Licking County, Ohio, not only because of its unique name, but because I have many ancestors and relatives there. It is one of Ohio's burned counties, having suffered a courthouse fire in 1875.

Fortunately, the property records survived intact. Court and marriage and probate records, not so much. But there are substitutes. One potential substitute is partition records -- court records of those cases where heirs agree on (or dispute) the partition or sale of land they inherited jointly. Sometimes these records include cute little maps of the divided-up property; very often they list all the heirs.

The situation in Licking County is complex and somewhat obscure, and you may find similar tangled webs in your burned county of choice. The county's partition records escaped the fire, and in fact have been not just microfilmed but recently digitized by FamilySearch in the "Ohio Probate Records 1789-1996" collection, totaling 7 million images. Like many such collections, there is no volunteer-created index (yet), and the digitized the in-book indexes fail the Mills Index Test: they do not cover all the cases in their own books.

Meanwhile, at some point the Licking County Clerk had the original partition records retyped, surely a huge job (and judging from the falling-apart character of the microfilmed originals, necessary). Apparently about this same time the clerk created an every-name index to these partition cases, including maiden and married names for the women. It occupies three heavy volumes now slumbering in the courthouse basement in Newark. (I almost missed them but the kind and helpful clerks found them.)

Fortunately, the original handwritten partition records were microfilmed. Unfortunately, the every-name indexes were not. That's a resource that court researchers would commit serious mayhem to have in THEIR county.

So while the partitions themselves are on line in their original form via FamilySearch, there is no decent index to them UNLESS you go to Newark on a weekday and ask at the clerk's office for the index books to be brought up from the basement so that you can tell which record book you need. (FYI the indexes do not give dates, but I can tell you that Partition Book C covers 1844-1851, E 1861-1865, and G 1869-1873.) This is the best substitute for the burned probates that I have seen yet -- provided that your family had real estate to partition!

Licking County does have its own Records and Archives Department. Its lists of old records and their whereabouts were indispensable in this quest, and then I learned about their new online catalog, still a work in progress. Their knowledge was also indispensable when I needed to consult mortgage indexes and mortgage books from before 1892 (the earliest index available in the recorder's office). They located the earlier indexes (still in the inventorying process) and the two actual mortgage volumes I needed, on short notice.

Apparently these are an extremely underused resource. I was happy to be (apparently) the first person to ask for them in decades, but hopefully others will follow much sooner. They add a dimension, especially in cases where the trail of deeds grows cold.



Photo credit: Licking County Courthouse, banukab's photostream, IMG 7587, flickr.com, per Creative Commons


Harold Henderson, "Not everything burned -- partitions and mortgages in Licking County, Ohio," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 July 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New NGS Magazine

Some of my favorites from the July-September issue of NGS Magazine:

* Southern Illinois University-Carbondale anthropologist Dawn C. Stricklin on locating scholarly and academic publications.

* John Philip Colletta's context for the life of Carl Ludwig Richter in and out of New York City's 19th-century "Little Germany." If you've heard any of his talks, you'll hear his voice as you read.

* Denys Beaugrand-Champagne on something we rarely think of as a Midwestern genealogical resource: fur trade permits granted in the district of Montreal, 1721-1752, which include mentions of places now in Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

* Claire Prechtel-Kluskens' reconstruction of the lives of the "lightning brothers" -- Civil War soldiers from Licking County, Ohio, whose tent was struck by lightning on 15 February 1863.

There's more . . . as they say in blogger land, read the whole thing.

Tracking Revolutionary War Pension Payments

I've heard top genealogists complain that we spend far more time learning where records are than what to do with them once we find them. NARA archivist Claire Prechtel-Kluskens does her darndest to right the balance with a blockbuster article in the Winter 2008 issue of Prologue, "Follow the Money: Tracking Revolutionary War Army Pension Payments." She writes,

Pension files of Revolutionary War veterans and their widows are well known as excellent genealogical and historical research sources. Few researchers, however, venture beyond the pension file to follow the "money trail" of records documenting the actual pension payments. . . .

Researching the records relating to pension payments is time consuming and involves understanding and using arcane, obscure, and unindexed records. It is not surprising, therefore, that no guide to this research has ever been published. This article attempts to fill this gap by going step-by-step through the research process . . . .

And what a gap it is. She leads the reader through a dozen or more record groups, following her example couple, Massachusetts patriot William McCullar and wife Chloe, through the decades to Chloe's probable death in the early 1840s in Licking County, Ohio. If you aspire to squeeze every ounce of information out of these records, print this one out and study it.

Munsell/Munselle

Nancy Cunningham and Nancy West put up a new family web site August 3, with an awesome collection of links to cemetery readings (with gravestone pictures) and scanned original documents such as marriage certificates for the Munsell/Munselle lines that moved from Licking County, Ohio, and Jefferson County, Illinois, to Texas. Anyone with any connection to this family will benefit from looking here, and anyone without it will be inspired to think of new ways to share their own family information.

Other lines connected by marriage include Barton, Brookman, Collister, Cornstubble, Cowey, Deveroux-Smith, Holliday, King, Shipp, Stephenson, and Tillotson.

Civil War Income Tax

Regardless of your politics, wars and revenue-hungry governments are the genealogists' friends, because they create records. Juliana Smith at 24-7 Family History Circle offers some good tips on searching Ancestry.com's new database from National Archives material, U.S. IRS Tax Assessment Lists, 1862-1918 -- essentially nationwide tax lists by state and district. I know a lot of folks have issues with Ancestry, but this is real help, much more than a puff piece for their index work.

Yeah, just when you got the idea of checking every relative born between 1820 and 1850 for Civil War service, now you can check every relative alive 1862-1866 for their tax records! Bear in mind that these returns were of public interest back then too -- I happened on some lists published in the Licking County, Ohio, newspaper, the Newark Advocate.

December OGSQ!

Contents of the December 2007 Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly,published by the largest state genealogical society in the US:

"The Lambert Family of Ohio," by Jan Trent Perna (Knox and Licking counties)

"Society of Civil War Families of Ohio Roster 2007," by Brent Dean Morgan

"Biographical Sketch of the Sloan Family," by Lettie Kuster (1910, Henry County)

"Understanding Your Ancestors' Autographs," by Linda Jean Limes Ellis

"Knox County: Some Facts and Figures" (1915)

"History of the Boyce Family" (1904) (Richland County)

"1884 Deaths in Cincinnati," transcribed by Kenny R. Burck and Doris Thomson

"Placing the West and Edwards Families in Kentucky and Ohio," by Jeanne Stella

"Genealogical Data Relating to Women in the Western Reserve Before 1850," by Jean Overmeier Nathan. This information, mostly from the late 1800s, includes this passage on Betsey Shaw Quiggle of Hambden Town[ship], Geauga County: "She raised eight children to maturity, and all their clothing and bedding was woven by her own hands. When out of thread, she manufactured some from the bark of soft wood trees."

"City Directory of Bryan, Ohio" (1932) (Williams County)

"Ohioans on the Move: Portrait and Biographical Album, Sedgwick County, Kansas," transcribed by Dan Spelman