136 years ago: the Upper Midwest from the back of a horse

During the 1800s, even ancestors who would end up staying home often tried going West to see how it suited them. My great-grandfather spent a few years in Kansas hoping to alleviate his wife's asthma, but they returned to southern Illinois.

And in the spring of 1879, my wife's great-grandfather left his young family behind for several weeks and took a 430-mile horseback ride west across part of Wisconsin and most of Minnesota. He sent back postcards and letters, which I transcribed and annotated, and which have now been published in the Minnesota Genealogical Quarterly. It's all there -- the rain, the cold, the boredom, the jokes, the universal presumption that if your traveling companion fell sick you could find him a bed in a farmhouse along the way, and forge on.


"Across Wisconsin and Minnesota on Horseback, 1879," Minnesota Genealogical Quarterly vol. 45, no. 4 (2014): 7-9.

I almost went to the library by accident: agriculture schedules

Trying to pinpoint a landless research target in the 1850 census between his landowning neighbors, I realized I needed to see if they were also neighbors in the agriculture schedule -- and made a note to check those records next time I visited a library that held them. Then I remembered which century it is, and typed "Ancestry nonpopulation schedules" into Google -- much easier than trying to locate them within Ancestry -- and discovered that their on-line holdings of these underused resources have grown.

Still nothing for Indiana or Wisconsin, but the 1850-1880 agriculture schedules for most counties in Illinois, Michigan and Ohio, can be browsed (at the township level, which is pretty quick) or searched. A total of 21 states are listed, including also Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New York.



Harold Henderson, "I almost went to the library by accident: agriculture schedules," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 September 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Tour the Pacific of 200 years ago in the April NYGBR

I shouldn't have been surprised -- but I was when I opened the April 2013 New York Genealogical and Biographical Record and found myself plunged into a series of trading voyages around and across the Pacific Ocean in the early 1800s, in the first installment of Edward E. Steele's lead article on Capt. William J. Pigot. Pigot and his family were New Yorkers all right, but he at least did not stay put. Steele combined a great story with great genealogy detective work to make sure the right story was being told about the right people.

(Those who read Steele's article will understand why this is the first genealogy article I ever read that brought to mind John Updike's early story, "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island," in Pigeon Feathers; now also in The New Yorker's subscriber-only online archive for 13 January 1962.)

More conventionally, I was pleased to find a crop of Midwesterners in the first installment of George R. Nye's account of the Preserved Fish Deuel family, with locations including Minnesota (Cottonwood, Faribault, McLeod, Brown, and Ramsey counties), Illinois (Lake County), Wisconsin (Waushara, Marquette, and Green Lake counties), and Iowa (Wright, Kossuth, and Osceola counties).

It's not a slam on the article to say that I enjoyed the footnotes just as much. As the author notes, the article "demonstrates the types of sources and analysis that can be used to document a family" even when vital records are few and far between. Among the alternatives employed were the hybrid township-military records created by many New York town clerks during the Civil War, documenting not only the service but genealogically relevant facts about soldiers from their area.

East-central Ohio (Coshocton, Licking, and Fairfield counties) also was a landing place for one descendant of the Pine-Pettit-Dorlon connection documented in the concluding part of Robert J. Meyers' account.




Edward E. Steele, "William J. Pigot, Captain of the Forester," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 85-100.

George R. Nye, "Children and Grandchildren of Preserved Fish7 Deuel of Cambridge and Massena, New York," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 123-39.

Robert J. Meyers, "A Pine-Pettit-Dorlon Connection: Untangling the Family of Elias D. Pine (1793-1866) of Hempstead, Long Island, New York (concluded)," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, vol. 144, no. 2 (April 2013), 140-54.



Harold Henderson, "Tour the Pacific of 200 years ago in the April NYGBR," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 10 June 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]  

More CG blogging

Cathi Desmarais, CG (SM) of northern Vermont, principal at Stone House Research, has picked an apt name for her new blog: No Stone Unturned, Adventures of a Board-Certified Genealogist in Vermont. As the descendant of at least two early Vermont families, I look forward to learning more about a place that I've only researched, um, amateurishly.

And speaking of up-north genealogy, blogger Paula Stuart Warren, CG (SM) will be doing a "crash course" for newcomers to Minnesota genealogy on Family Tree University Wednesday.

Spring 2011 American Ancestors: SDBs, methods, and more

The current (spring 2011) issue of the New England Historic Genealogical Society's popular publication, American Ancestors: New England, New York, and Beyond, heralds the addition of back issues of the Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine to the NEHGS web site. Inside are numerous articles. I was struck by two with Midwestern angles, and one of methodological interest:

Shellee A. Morehead provides "A Genealogist's Guide to Seventh Day Baptists," a branch of the Baptists from Rhode Island founded in 1671. Many members settled in or near Milton, Rock County, Wisconsin as they moved west from New York and New Jersey; today their historical center is in Janesville. Although never large, this sect was exceptionally cohesive and generated good records. Those who stuck to their conviction that worship should be held on Saturday also found it convenient to live in clusters. So there was a good deal of intermarriage as well as an early well-developed system of national newspaper communication. You could have SDBs in your tree without knowing it, and Morehead provides a table of surnames and locations (although at least one later location in North Loup, Nebraska, is absent).

Sherill Baldwin outlines the hard-to discover life of Rev. E. W. Dunbar (1823-1893), an effective preacher and popular hymn author, who also did time in Minnesota for bigamy.

Even those without Huguenot ancestry will find methodological interest in Oliver Popenoe's research chronology explaining how he managed to break a brick wall and add generations of prosperous French ancestors to his tree. Two intertwined strategies are noteworthy: he spent a lot of time researching the papers of an unrelated patron of his known ancestor; and early on in his research push he established a web site to document it. Together the classic broaden-the-search strategy and the 21st-century approach got the job done.

Midwesterners in NGS Magazine January-March issue

If you're hungry for Midwestern genealogy, the current issue of the National Genealogical Society's NGS Magazine has four treats for you:

(1) Jennifer Holik-Urban's story on her WWI great-great uncle Michael Kokoska, who died in France but was eventually laid to rest in his family's plot in Bohemian National Cemetery in Chicago;

(2) Nancy Neils Wehner's story on tracing her WWII Navy grandfather, who enlisted in Omaha, trained near Chicago, and was finally assigned to Tank Ship LST-599 in Evansville (Indiana);

(3) Cari A. Taplin on her northwestern Ohio Sly family's "relationship" to the southern Ohio Slye family of TV cowboy Roy Rogers; and

(4) a bouquet of identity-determination case studies ranging over several states from Minnesota's J. H. Fonkert, CG.

Sixty Million Acres!

Thanks to the helpful folks on the Transitional Genealogists list, I have now purchased and read James W. Oberly's detailed study, Sixty Million Acres: American Veterans and the Public Lands before the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990). It's definitely worth your time if you deal regularly with bounty-land recipients under the four different Congressional acts passed in 1847, 1850, 1852, and 1855, which together involved most veterans of most wars from the War of 1812 through the Mexican War. It's also good microscopic historical background, connecting these laws with the changing politics of that era, and also reviewing and modifying past interpretations by earlier generations of historians.

Oberly starts with the politics: how Congress decided how to distribute the public land (it all started with the need to boost recruitment pronto during the Mexican War), how the administrative offices implemented distribution, and how the recipients (veterans and widows) used their warrants.

At the time, there was much concern about speculators monopolizing land or bilking veterans. Oberly finds little evidence that they did, but they did make some windfall profits.

The expectation that these warrants would spark additional settlement by the veterans themselves was also not fulfilled. (A very rough comparison: if the government offered Alaskan bush land to Vietnam-era veterans now, how many would choose to go?) In Oberly's random sample of warrants, fewer than 5 percent of the recipients used them to "locate" land for themselves. {92} Most warrants were sold, often through middlemen, and there were intertwined national and local markets for them. The market seems to have been competitive, and somewhat volatile. In general Oberly thinks the sellers did OK. (Genealogical lesson #1: if you find such a warrant in use, the odds are very good that the person who took up the land was not the original recipient and quite possibly not a veteran of any of those wars.)

The line of settlement pretty much determined where the warrants ended up being located: Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin together make up roughly half the acreage, with Missouri and Minnesota close behind. {85} Southern states were underrepresented in part because the big boom state in those years was Texas, which had its own public-lands system inherited from its brief independence.

The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia

This year a kind and generous Santa brought me The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia, an 1891-page behemoth edited by Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton. (Cayton, as faithful readers of this blog already know, wrote the wonderful Frontier Indiana.) Their "Midwest" is more inclusive than this blog's: besides Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, it includes Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and both Dakotas.

The encyclopedia's 22 chapters each contain many individual articles by expert authors with additional reading suggestions. They run from geography to small-town life to military affairs, but its index has no entry for "genealogy." It's all relevant, of course, but of particular interest to genealogists may be "Cultural Geography" (p. 145), "Peoples" (p. 177), "Language" (p. 278), and the brief sketch of "State and Local Historical Societies" (p. 654). As a fan of Cayton's "General Overview" (p. xix), I'll give him the floor:

The conquest, settlement, and development of what we call the Midwest is one of the most important events in the past quarter millennium of human history. In the nineteenth century, millions of people entered this interior region, forcibly displaced thousands of American Indians, and established a society that dominated North America and much of the globe throughout the twentieth century. This breathtaking transformation amounts to one of the most all-encompassing and significant revolutions in the history of the world. ...

The Midwest in fact is not the land of the bland, but a collection of disparate communities held together, more or less, by a civic culture that transcends (or at least ignores) differences...

Read the whole thing.

Resources for the Olden Times

In the Midwest, "olden times" are before statehood. In the October-December 2008 NGS Magazine, Dian VanSkiver Gagel, immediate past president of the Ohio Genealogical Society, describes colonial and territorial records for the Midwest and elsewhere. (I had never thought about the research implications of the fact that Minnesota was under at least seven different jurisdictions prior to 1857!)

Gagel also mentions what sounds like a useful resource if you're working in this time period: Michal Chiorazzi and Marguerite Most, eds., Prestatehood Legal Materials: A Fifty-State Research Guide, including New York City and the District of Columbia, 2 volumes (New York: The Haworth Information Press, 2005). Worldcat shows it mostly in law-school libraries, although among more accessible Midwestern libraries, it's also available at the Library of Michigan, Allen County Public Library (Fort Wayne), Milwaukee County, and Grand Rapids.

More Ohio Civil War Genealogy

Action-packed issue #2 of this year's Ohio Civil War Genealogy Journal, with the motto, "Bringing back to life Ohio soldiers who served in the Civil War, through their stories and records. Bringing back to Ohio the soldiers who were lost or moved on after the war."

"The Brown Water Navy: The Ironclads of the Mississippi River Squadron and the Exploits of Acting Volunteer Lieutenant Commander William Rion Hoel," by Matthew Hoel. WRH played a key role in the Battle of Island No. 10, a key stage in the Union's regaining control of the Mississippi.

"Recollections of Columbus Huddle, 46th OVI," by Kittie Huddle Millikin, with added editorial notes.

"Book Review: Both Prayed to the Same God: Religion and Faith in the American Civil War, by Robert J. Miller"; reviewed by Dan Reigle

"John Wolf, Meigs County OH, 4th West Virginia Infantry," submitted by Darrell Helton

"Ask the Experts" including "Ohio Veterans in Yellow Medicine County MN," submitted by Michelle Gatz

"Death of Lorenzo Barnell, 9th Ohio Independent Battery Light Artillery," submitted by Tanis Diedrichs

"George Gilmer, 22nd Iowa Infantry, Mortally Wounded at Vicksburg," submitted by Mila Sloan

"William Clouse, 99th OVI, Ohio City OH," submitted by Rodger Norton

"1883 Census of Pensioners, Mahoning County, Ohio," by Michael Elliott -- plus a list of counties published in OCWGJ

"Members of Van West Post 627, Grand Army of the Republic," by Rodger Norton and Daniel H. Reigle

Midwesterners in NGSQ

Midwesterners figure in two of the intricate methodological adventures in the current (March) issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

In "Clara V. Moore and Carrie Peterson: Proving a Double Enumeration in the 1910 Census," J. H. Fonkert, CG, manages to prove that 34-year-old Norway-born Clara V. Moore and her "sister" 37-year-old Norway-born Carrie Peterson in the household at 24 Thirteenth Street in Minneapolis were in fact the same person -- the double entry being the product of some extraordinarily inept census-taking. Conclusion: "Clara was Carrie, Vivian was Sigrid, and Earl was Hjalmar....Researchers must always question census information."

In "Tying Together Indirect Evidence: Finding Frederick Drollinger's Father," Kay Germain Ingalls, CG, produces what seems at first to be genealogical sleight-of-hand, proving that Frederick's father was John from a Preble County, Ohio, Chancery Court case that was litigated long after Frederick and John were both dead, in a state where neither ever lived.

Midwestern celebrity roots

Paula Stuart-Warren of Zimmerman (Sherburne County), Minnesota, blogging at Paula's Genealogical Eclectica, is happy to hear that the BBC's "Who Do You Think You Are?" may be coming to NBC.

whenever I see an obituary of some singer or actor that has mention of upper Midwest roots, I do some research to just see where that person fit into the history of the upper Midwest. It has been interesting to see what the ancestral towns are and what the rest of the family was doing in times past.

Past projects she's worked on professionally include the Beach Boys and John Berryman. Hmm, there's no obituary yet, but does anyone have the genealogical scoop on how Dave Letterman's Midwestern roots make him funny? Or long-lasting?