Breaking down a brick wall + Milwaukee Germans

The occasional blog "Relative Musings" has a nice story about breaking down a "Bruce" family brick wall in early Milwaukee.

And if it's Germans in Milwaukee you want, be sure to visit Adele Marcum's really well sourced blog called, well, Milwaukee Germans.

Genealogy and teacher education

Dr. Christine Sleeter, professor emerita at California State University, Monterey Bay, will talk about "Critical Family History, Identity & Historical Memory" September 25 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

It turns out that well-done family history can help new teachers recognize that their own identities and histories are not so simple -- white people have ethnicity too! -- and thus be better able to deal with the diverse classrooms they'll encounter. Sleeter discovered this for herself researching her own family history, while always asking about the context: who else was living there and what the different groups' political, economic and social relationships were at the time. It turns out that good genealogical practice is good historical and teacher-training practice too.

"Our stories are our own stories," she wrote in Educational Studies 43(2):114 [apparently available online only through academic databases], "but they need to be informed." When she started asking questions she learned, for instance, that her probable great-grandparents left east Tennessee abruptly in the early 1880s and settled in Yampa, Colorado, from which the Ute Indians had recently been forced out. In an 1885 census, she writes, "Oliver reported being from Switzerland, and Celesta from Germany. I suspect they left Tennessee to escape Jim Crow, and concocted stories about where they were from to explain the not-quite-Anglo appearance of one or both of them." There's some DNA and census evidence that her family's vague story of Cherokee ancestry may have been a mask for a less acceptable situation -- an ancestor who was the child of a slaveowner and a slave.

I had no idea that family history was being used professionally in this way; it's part of the evolution of genealogy, from telling simple stories that deify historic ancestors, to understanding that often unpleasant facts of violence and racism lurk in all of our pasts.

. . . But in that process we shouldn't lose our methodology: Sleeter assumes too much about census informants. In fact, we don't know who gave any census taker the information that was written down.

P.S. Two genealogy/history books that combine good research and uncomfortable truths are Martha Hodes' The Sea Captain's Wife and Victoria Freeman's Distant Relations.

Germans in NW Ohio

If you've got Germans and live within range, check out the noon brown-bag program at the Sandusky Library Archives Research Center this Wednesday. "Becky Hill, Head Librarian of the Hayes Presidential Center [another online and physical resource in NW Ohio you don't want to miss], will discuss the German roots of a large percentage of Northwest Ohio residents. Germans in this area came mostly from two different migrations - one usually through Pennsylvania in the 1700s; the other direct from Germany in the 1800s." SLARC has details and registration info.

College football and genealogy

Writing in Friday's issue of the Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Franklin County, Ohio), Michael Arace reports on Robert Neal's report on his Methodist relatives, Granville and Oliver Frambes. Granville sold much of the land on which Ohio State University now stands; Orville went west as a missionary and founded the Los Angeles Academy which became the University of Southern California. Without this pair of brothers tonight's college football extravaganza might not have been possible.

If you're more interested in the Frambes families than in the score of the OSU-USC showdown, one starting point a couple of moderately well sourced online databases are at worldconnect when you search on Granville Frambes. Orville married a Stevens, and Google Book Search shows snippets of a Stevens book that at least mentions Frambes.

Getting down to business in Michigan

Jasia, world's liveliest genealogy blogger, laments in a comment yesterday not getting much help finding business records in the Mitten State. I found one place to start on line, but clearly you'd have to go there, and what they have might not necessarily be what you need -- that's the way with archives.

The Archives of Michigan enumerates more than 100 businesses for which they have something in this circular (all these circulars are PDF files).

Of course it won't include her grandfather's baking company unless those records were saved and donated there. Maybe they weren't kept. Or maybe they were donated to another archive, closer to home. Or maybe they're still moldering away in some relative's attic! (I have a research target that was a Michigan business for years, but its archives, to the extent they exist, are across the lake in Wisconsin because the business later moved.)

Looks like you might have better luck if your research target was a Michigan corporation, because they had to file reports to the state starting in 1840. Here's the Archives of Michigan's corporation circular, but it doesn't name them all. Looks like lotsa microfilm, the 1840-1980 index alone runs 25 reels. Obviously it'd be a big help to know when your targets were in business there.

But that's not all. The Archives also has circulars indicating their holdings in shipping and navigation; mining; lumbering, logging, and forestry (including some payrolls); licensed professions (auctioneers and ferry masters go way back); and account books and ledgers (including individuals, churches, societies; some going back to 1813). Yee haw!

Getting down to business

It's pretty much 100% likely that your ancestors worked for someone else, or started a business that employed others. The records generated this way may still exist. But how many people get around to them?

If the idea of "most underrated" made any sense, I'd be tempted to say business records are the most underrated category of records among genealogists. The Newberry Library recently added a research guide, American Business History Research at the Newberry Library, that has helpful resources even for those who can't get to the actual library.

Annals of Cleveland

The Allen County (Indiana) Public Library's monthly email newsletter, "Genealogy Gems" (back issues here), can be counted on for at least one resource find per issue. In July (yes, I am behind, thank you for asking) we find the Annals of Cleveland, a WPA-era indexing of early city newspapers and court cases as "Cleveland Newspaper Digest" 1818-76 and the "Cleveland Court Record Series" 1837-77. They're available in both microfiche and bound volumes, although the print version of the newspaper digest stops in 1858. An online taste is available here.