Fannie Fern Crandall and Her Three-Timing Darling "Husband"

My mother-in-law's grandmother's sister Fannie Fern Crandall was not someone we heard much about, and we never thought to ask. The newly arrived (on line) March 2018 issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly includes the results of my research that makes her almost as well-documented as her sister, who married a Seventh-Day Baptist minister. (It's available free to NGS members.)

Fannie's father Charles Welcome Crandall suffered an injury early in his Civil War service and later drew a pension. He was caught claiming more disability than he really had, and in his struggle to regain the pension he met up with a charismatic attorney in Chicago -- Frank Ira Darling -- where they were neighbors.

It turns out that Frank's work as an attorney brought him together with many a Civil War veteran, and many a daughter. He had six children with three of his clients' daughters, including the one to whom he was legally married.

Frank died unexpectedly in his 40s, and the story of two of the three came out in a blaze of sensational publicity in January 1898. Fannie was the third and she kept quiet, but evidence starting with Charles's pension file leaves no doubt that Frank was the father of her child, a daughter who grew up and married and left no descendants. (Those who follow NGSQ may recall the tale told by co-editor Thomas W. Jones about George Wellington Edison, an even more swashbuckling and disreputable character in Illinois, in 2012.)

What we will probably never know -- unless old correspondence surfaces -- is what Fannie knew and when she knew it, and what she thought about it all. After a few years in the early 1900s when she went by the surname "Brown" for no known reason, she used the Darling surname throughout the rest of her life. She earned a living and brought up her daughter by clerking and stenography in Washington, D.C., including in the patent office. In later years she had an artistic career in southern California, but she also had to have been a resilient and determined person.

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.

Just when you think you've got the whole family . . .

Few things genealogical are more fun than finding a probate that reveals a supposed bachelor marrying, fathering five children, and dying -- all within the 1880-1900 "little dark age." Without the probate they and their mother would have been difficult or impossible to find. We're talking Pennsylvania here, no marriage records. And so far this branch of the family appears not to have been in communication, even though it was one of the few who remained in Erie County. Did somebody have a quarrel?

After a fifteen-month nap (er, hiatus) I will try restarting this blog on a weekly basis.

* The big genealogy news is Karen Jones's planned retirement as editor of one of the top five US scholarly genealogy journals. Those who have worked with and for her at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record wish her the best (and longest!) retirement, with many delayed ancestors found and published.

* Speaking of the Record, I have a short article in the January issue: “‘A continual claim and struggle’: DeGrove Gleanings from the Appellate Court,” New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 148 (January 2017): 61-64. It's a brief addendum to William DeGrove's ongoing saga of this New York family in the 19th century.

* It's never a mistake to draw up a timeline! I prepared one just to cut out a lot of boring text in a family history. It showed some interesting connections and unexpectedly provoked more city directory research, leading to some original records that may shed light on a Pennsylvania-Ohio family that is visible in only one census between 1860 and 1900. With luck this could be a publishable article in itself.

* GRIP may be the only genealogy institute capable of bilocation, with Deb Deal representing it at this weekend's Ohio conference and Elissa Powell doing the same in New England.

Methodology Monday and Labor Day with Philippina Kicherer

Genealogy is about remembrance, not just descendants. Or as Tom Jones puts it in Mastering Genealogical Proof, genealogical questions are usually about a relationship, identity, or activity (pp. 7-8).

Judy Kellar Fox's article leading off the June 2014 National Genealogical Society Quarterly is an example of an activity question, but not one like whether someone served in the Revolution. Her subject, Philippina Magdalena (Kaiser) Kicherer, emigrated and married late, helped raise stepchildren, ran a Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, farmhouse, and died in 1909.

How and why did she come there?

Without the aid of family letters or reminiscences, Fox spotted the name of a man who was Philippina's associate, not her husband's, and the name of a particular part of Germany rarely included in US census designations -- and worked out Philippina's otherwise forgotten story. Sometimes the supposedly dry bones of technical genealogy are the only way to learn those stories.





Judy Kellar Fox, "Why and How Did Philippina Kicherer Immigrate to Jefferson County, Pennsylvania?," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 85-92.

Harold Henderson, "Methodology Monday and Labor Day with Philippina Kicherer," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 September 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodology Sunday with NGSQ: A Boren Family in Pittsburgh

Samuel W. Boren's 1898 Pittsburgh death certificate said that he was 69 and that his parents were both named Boren. Ten years later his grandson wrote down a more informative, brief, and entirely unsourced profile of Samuel's birth family. In the June issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly, I treated it as a hypothesis and managed to confirm it, relying on indirect evidence and evidence from better-documented siblings.

Key records were censuses, city directories, Methodist newspapers and records, tax lists, property records, and vital records (in a state other than Pennsylvania). Key tools included establishing a migration chronology (mostly in and around Pittsburgh), creating tables to condense and correlate multiple pieces of evidence, and establishing connections between Samuel, each of his two brothers, and their sisters.

Of course, the conclusion that Samuel's parents were John Boren and Elizabeth Moore just sets up two more tricky parentage problems in early 19th-century "Dark Age" western Pennsylvania genealogy.

Like many articles, this one has had multiple incarnations. It is the more finished version of a case presented to half of the January 2014 Salt Lake Institute of Genealogy Advanced Evidence Practicum. And it will be one of several proof arguments to be dissected in the January 2015 SLIG course "From Confusion to Conclusion." Samuel was or is my great-great-great grandfather-in-law.



Harold Henderson, "Testing Family Lore to Determine the Parentage of Samuel W. Boren of Pittsburgh," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 102 (June 2014): 97-110.


Harold Henderson, "Methodology Sunday with NGSQ: A Boren Family in Pittsburgh," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 July 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Illinois Civil War, Kalamazoo, Route 66, and more -- what's not to like?

Has anybody out there still not subscribed to the smart, knowledgeable, uncluttered weekly collection of links from the University of Wisconsin's Internet Scout Report?

If so, this would be a good week to take a look. It's almost as if Midwestern Microhistory had a secret agent there! Starting at the center of this blog's geographic interest and working out:

Digitized Civil War letters from Illinois (Northern Illinois University)

Photos from Kalamazoo College (Kalamazoo College)

Oral histories of Route 66 in Missouri (Missouri State University)

Central Pennsylvania landscape, landscape architecture, and architecture (Penn State University)

Old New Hampshire maps and atlases (University of New Hampshire)

Archive of Early American Images, 1600s-early 1800s (Brown University)

Even when we want to, it's not always easy for genealogists to find their way to the resources of academia. This outlet -- either as weekly newsletter or as web site -- is worth the time for that reason alone.



Harold Henderson, "Illinois Civil War, Kalamazoo, Route 66, and more -- what's not to like?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 16 May 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

On-line newspapers by state

Digitized newspapers are everywhere, but so many different outfits -- both free and commercial -- are getting in on the act that it can be hard to keep with which ones are available where your ancestors lived. Kenneth R. Marks over at The Ancestor Hunt has a series of listings by state, including Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana, as well as New York, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maine. I haven't used them all . . . yet.


Harold Henderson, "On-line newspapers by state," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 1 March 2014 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

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.]

Objectors to war have descendants, too

Cindy Freed at the group blog In-Depth Genealogist calls attention to a Civil War database of Pennsylvanians whose religious convictions prevented them from accepting a draft to serve in the Union army. Her title ("Bet You've Never Researched This") may grate on those with lots of Quaker ancestors, or those from the German Brethren churches who took a similar stand. But her title does reflect an ambivalence in genealogy between honoring individual service and sacrifice in war, on one hand, and support of war in general, on the other. (An earlier post along these lines is here.)

Additional sources for more recent conscientious objectors can be found in National Archives Record Group 163, "Selective Service System (World War I), 1917-1939," and Record Group 147, "Records of the Selective Service System 1940-," and in various federal court records.





Cindy Freed, "Bet You've Never Researched This," The In-Depth Genealogist, posted 6 May 2012 (http://www.theindepthgenealogist.com/?p=6448 : accessed 6 May 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Objectors to war have descendants, too," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.] 

Giving Thanks for Pennsylvania Deeds

Many genealogists think of Pennsylvania and New York as exceptionally difficult places to research. But really, they are just places with different sets of strengths and weaknesses in records than what we're used to. As I was reminded last week, one asset many 200-year-old Pennsylvania deeds have that I rarely see in the Midwest is a tendency to recite the chain of title, or at least part of it. And when the chain of title is also a family tree, what's not to like?

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Deeds 24:374, Moor to Hamilton, 4 August 1821; Department of Real Estate, Pittsburgh.

Harold Henderson, "Giving Thanks for Pennsylvania Deeds," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Methodists in Meadville

Those who have research targets who were Methodists in western Pennsylvania need to know about the denominational archives at Allegheny College's Pelletier Library in Meadville, Crawford County, Pennsylvania. It would be a good destination anyway, but given the absence of early vital records from Pennsylvania it's a great one.

First of all, it's an archive, so don't try just dropping in. Use the contact information. Volunteer archivist William L. Waybright is very knowledgeable and helpful, but he can't be there all the time. It's by appointment only.

Second, don't expect the archives to be able to tell you whether your ancestor was a Methodist (or an allied denomination, such as Evangelical United Brethren).

Third, check the ancestor's own church first. As in most denominations, records reside at the local level. If a local church ceases to exist, its records may find their way to a denominational archive.

Fourth, be prepared to use a particular variant of cluster genealogy: what ministers were your research targets associated with? The archives will normally have much better records for those who carried the church's message than anyone else.

Fifth, don't be overly focused on western Pennsylvania. The archives has records and published reminiscences that cover adjoining conferences as well.

Sixth, when visiting, don't expect lots of space to spread out. We had the good fortune to meet other researchers who knew the area and resources better than we did, and we met them over what would be a normal-sized kitchen table.

Seventh, be alert to finding aids that area Methodist historians have prepared over the years. Pittsburgh-area Methodists published a weekly newspaper for about a century beginning in 1834, usually under the title of Pittsburgh Christian Advocate. Abstracts and indexes to its marriage and death notices have been published from through 1870. The newspaper itself has been microfilmed, but Meadville holds the films only up to 1890.

Finally, in the likely event that your Methodists went past Pittsburgh into the Midwest and West, additional regional resources do exist. The Chicago Genealogical Society's new blog recently posted on their instructional visit to Garrett Evangelical United Library in Evanston.


Harold Henderson, "Methodists in Meadville," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 September 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Three Brothers Northamer: More NGSQ Genealogy Olympics

No vital records, no church records, no helpful probates or deeds, no useful pension records, no useful guardianships -- how is a Pennsylvania genealogist to identify which of three brothers fathered Jacob Northamer and William Northamer in the late 1700s? Not from family speculations, as it turned out.

Northamer descendants Catherine Becker Wiest Desmarais, CG, and Noreen Alexander Manzella found a way. They describe it in the third article of the amazing June issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

Stage one -- logically, not chronologically! -- was elimination. Census, cemetery, and church records helped eliminate two of the three brothers. They also distinguish young William from a same-name first cousin five years older.

Reasoning by elimination can be a good start, but by itself it's not terribly convincing. In stage two, the authors found affirmative evidence connection young Jacob and William to the third brother, Nicholas Northamer.

Tax records showed that the young men were of the right ages, lived in the same township as Nicholas, and moved together. Even better, the same records also showed that the young men worked in the same trade as Nicholas, again unlike Nicholas's two brothers. (Woven into the logic of discovery are hints at some colorful and tragic family stories, which hopefully will see the light elsewhere.)

None of these records comes right out and names Nicholas as the father. This brick wall was felled by a weaving of gossamer threads of evidence, no one of which by itself looks like a match for a brick. But together . . .



Cathi Becker Wiest Desmarais and Noreen Alexander Manzella, "Who Fathered Jacob and William Northamer? Pennsylvania Tax Records Help Determine Kinship," National Genealogical Society Quarterly vol. 100, no. 2 (June 2012):123-32.

Harold Henderson, "Three Brothers Northamer: More NGSQ Genealogy Olympics," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 August 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Mostly Midwestern genealogy finds on and off the web

* The summer issue of the Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly includes a well-cited article by Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five Ferguson Brothers from Scotland."A bonus for me: ISGSQ is using footnotes instead of the dreaded endnotes.


* As usual, the Ohio Genealogy News is packed with instructional articles of interest. For Summer 2012, I particularly enjoyed:

Chris Staats' "Deed Anatomy 101" with a clever graphic;

Joyce Quigley's "Online Cemetery Research" (interment records!); and

Delores Jones's "My Last Name is Jones (Success with a Common Surname)": "The only way I found my Jones family in the 1930 U.S. census for Mississippi was by reading my late aunt's papers again."


* Whenever you're in a law library, take the opportunity to snoop around. During IGHR at Samford, some sharp-eyed Pennsylvania researchers found an unlikely treasure: county-level court case reports for several counties in Pennsylvania, mostly from the 20th century. Who knew?


* Joe Beine has updated his wonderful index to on-line indexes of death records of various kinds, including indexes for ten Midwestern counties:

in Illinois -- DeKalb, McDonough, Sangamon, and Will;

in Michigan -- Menominee, Oakland, and Wayne;

in Ohio -- Montgomery; and

in Wisconsin -- Barron and Eau Claire.





Charlene Preston Mundy, "Five Ferguson Brothers from Scotland,"Illinois State Genealogical Society Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 74-91.

Ohio Genealogy News, vol 43, no. 2 (Summer 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Midwestern genealogy finds on and off the web," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Noir in Lawrence County Pennsylvania

Thanks to Kerry Scott for mentioning Diarmid Mogg's Small Town Noir blog on Facebook for us slowpokes to notice. It focuses on small-time criminals, complete with mug shots, from the small Rust Belt city of New Castle, Lawrence County, Pennsylvania -- northwest of Pittsburgh and right next to Ohio, so I hereby nominate it as an honorary portion of the Midwest. But it goes beyond the rap sheet to chronicle what he finds about "the rest of the story."

Needless to say, this is not your grandmother's genealogy (unless she was picked up for forging checks). But it's a real and little-noticed part of history. I'm not aware of comparable blogs from other places, although the Chicago Homicide database (blogged here in 2009) has some similar qualities.

Our Savage Neighbors

I can't think of many nonfiction books that were so gruesome and depressing that I deliberately quit reading them, but I almost did that halfway through Peter Silver's Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). So it's not for everyone.

Most of the book is a close and careful reading of what people wrote and said about the ongoing Indian guerrilla wars in Pennsylvania and nearby colonies from about 1750 to 1785 -- so it will be of interest to anyone with ancestors or relatives in that unprecedentedly diverse and turbulent society of English, Germans, Irish, Indians, and other groups.

Silver draws many interesting and provocative ideas from this material, among them:

• Diversity itself, he finds, did not lead to mutual tolerance and understanding -- indeed, often the opposite as people reacted against their neighbors. However, having an outside enemy sometimes did. {xviii-xix}

• Even a few people who were willing to use violence had inordinate power to shape events. Their actions often set off a chain of revenge that led to major changes and wars, as in the case of the Paxton boys and the 1782 genocidal massacre of pacifist Christian Indians by white Americans at Gnadenhütten in what is now Tuscarawas County, Ohio. {xxv-xxvi, 265ff.}

• Racial prejudice as we know it played very little role on the white side of the Indian wars of the 1700s (racism as we know it was not invented until the following century). {294ff.} More important were fear and greed for land.

• "Somehow, out of such unpromising beginnings, one of history's most self-consciously tolerant societies was made. The idea of 'the white people' may have helped some people to feel greater sympathetic identification with other Europeans -- even as it made a few, like the Quakers, into cultural villains, and drove up negative feelings toward all Indians." {xxiii}

Not finding Frank Adams

Do you have what it takes to spend 40 years researching a missing grandfather? Don't miss Joseph F. Martin's wonderful story of his search in Michigan and Illinois and beyond, in the National Genealogical Society newsletter "Up Front."

This article is a form of "research travelogue," reviled by some genealogy journal editors for following chronology rather than logic. But it has its place in our literature, if only because it is closer to the actual experience of research and as such provides unique learning opportunities.

Methodology Monday with Basil Williams

"Perhaps more frequently and firmly than many genealogical sources, land records enable kinship determination." That's Nicki Peak Birch, CG, writing in her article, "Tracking Basil Williams of Maryland and Pennsylvania Through Changing Residences and Multiple Marriages," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 96:23-37, March 2008. Some members of the Great Lakes Chapter of APG discussed it a couple of weeks ago.

One of the article's basic questions is whether the Basil Williams of Frederick County and Anne Arundel counties in Maryland and Washington County in Pennsylvania are the same man. The answer is, yes and no. "Debt books" recording land in Maryland help show that there was only one Basil Williams there, but Revolutionary War pension files show that there were two Basils later. The argument is not simple, and it may get another workout in a discussion session at the spring Ohio Genealogical Society conference in Toledo.

In any case, Birch's message could use some repetition. I find county land offices (by whatever name) some of the easiest places to work -- they're used to people coming in and going about their business -- but rarely are my elbows jostled by fellow genealogists.

Migration routes New England to NE Ohio

Late last year there were several interesting posts at H-Connecticut on overland migration routes through New York state and Pennsylvania to the Western Reserve of Ohio some 200 years ago. Here's a taste, from the post by Alden O'Brien of the DAR Museum:

There were two main routes to Ohio: thru NY State on a variety of new
turnpikes, and thru Pennsylvania on the "Forbes Road". Roots and Routes
lists some published diaries c 1810 detailing travel on the Forbes road.
I hadn't encountered Roots and Routes before. They say they're
"about family history, heritage travel and more.Our idea is to
use the cultural connections, great migrations, settlements and
symbolic landscapes of North America to inform these popular
avocations and make them more meaningful."

Did your ancestor do time in Pennsylvania in the 1800s?

Lafayette College economist Howard Bodenhorn has studied patterns of criminal sentencing in mid-19th-century Pennsylvania, and the National Bureau of Economic Research has put an abstract of his working paper #14283 on the web. In short,

The observed disparities [in sentencing] in the mid-nineteenth century . . . are different than modern disparities. Instead of longer sentences, African Americans and recent immigrants tended to receive shorter sentences, whereas more affluent offenders received longer sentences. The results are consistent with other interpretations of the period as the "era of the common man."

(Gee, I wonder what kind of era we're living in?)

If that makes you want to read the whole thing, you'll either have to pay $5 or get next to an academic database.

Check his list of publications on the web site for leads on some more offbeat angles on genealogy, such as "Single Parenthood and Childhood Outcomes in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Urban South" and "Colorism, Complexion Homogamy and Household Wealth: Some Historical Evidence."