Scary Evidence Evaluations I Have Known, Plus an Update

Wording tweaked, thoughts preserved, names omitted to protect the guilty...


More people have posted this than anything else.

Several people entered this, but some of the dates are different.

Go by the earliest census record.


Do you have a favorite?


In less scary news, I have updated my list of the numbers of all the Family History Library microfilms that were on indefinite loan at the Allen County Public Library Genealogy Center as of 13 October.



Harold Henderson, "Scary Evidence Evaluations I Have Known," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 31 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Kind of Blog Every County Needs

Sonja Hunter at Bushwhacking Genealogy digs into the details of researching in Kalamazoo County, Michigan.




Harold Henderson, "The Kind of Blog Every County Needs," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New Books and Old Manuscripts

The Indiana Historical Society acquired many items in June and July. Three that caught my eye:

* James Joseph Buss, Winning the West with Words: Language and Conquest in the Lower Great Lakes. One chapter reportedly focuses on squatters in the Michigan City and La Porte area of Indiana, but the large theme has to do with the erasure of the "wrong people" from popular history.

* Civil War and other letters and papers of James H. Guy, who served in the 35th Indiana Volunteers (organized in Indianapolis in 1864).

* Civil war diary and documents of Selar Mead, who served in the 93rd Indiana (organized in Indianapolis, Madison, and New Albany in 1862).

Reviewed in the current American Historical Review:

* Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal City, 1820-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). "Among the topics woven into the argument are the impact of variations in daytime workers' quitting times; bad behavior on trolleys or 'owl cars'; the growth of countercyclical nocturnal labor for sanitation, industrial, bakery, dock, and newspaper workers; the effect of crime-ridden early taxis, known as 'night hawks'; and efforts by reformers to combat delinquency after ark with boys' clubs." (p. 1236)

* James W. Feldman, A Storied Wilderness: Rewilding the Apostle Islands (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). "The author argues that officialdom would do better to recognize that 'wilderness' contains human stories" that do not need to be erased. "In the early nineteenth century, productive uses were not assumed to be incompatible with tourism, and . . . fishermen provided summer tourists with food, and local landowners augmented their incomes by building tourist lodgings and restaurants." (pp. 1265-66)



"New in Collections and Library," Indiana Historical Society INPerspective, vol. 19, no. 2 (November-December 2012): 13.

Harold Henderson, "New Books and Old Manuscripts," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 29 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Ration Books and Encyclopedia Annuals

Hat tip to the UpFront with NGS blog highlighting Illya D'Addezio's WW2 ration book collection at Genealogy Today. GT has a number of other offbeat but potentially very helpful sources to seek out.

And it reminded me of another source that you may need to be "a certain age" to remember: the encyclopedia "annual" or "Year Book" chronicling the events of the year just past. I picked up the 1944 Collier's Year Book, covering the events of 1943, at a used-book store years ago. It has a similar fascination to old gazetteers in that it tells the story as it looked when it was happening -- complete with political and sectional infighting -- not in the sentimental pastels of nostalgia. Here's Smith College historian Harold U. Faulkner on rationing during 1943:

On Jan. 2 the OPA [Office of Price Administration] banned all pleasure driving. . . . When pleasure driving was banned, the OPA continued to allow Eastern A-card holders three gallons a week for essential driving. Many car owners, nevertheless, criticized the ban on pleasure driving, insisting that if they were given oil, they should have the right to use it as they pleased. On March 22 the Government lifted the ban, but cut the Eastern A cards from three to one and a half gallons a week. This angered the East for the Middle West was getting four gallons. Black market buying increased and on May 20 the restriction on pleasure driving was renewed.

It wasn't always "all for one and one for all" even during the "good war."

This yearbook had articles from "accidents and accident prevention" to "zoology," plus photos, maps of war areas, and statistical tables, all from the point of view of sixty-eight years ago.

From front to back the annual was dominated by the world war. But even in time of total war there was still room for articles on college and professional football, which in 1943 were dominated by Notre Dame and the Chicago Bears respectively. Not all franchises were able to maintain a team: reportedly, "The Pittsburgh and Philadelphia clubs merged as the Steagles." I won't tell their present-day fans if you won't!



Harold Underwood Faulkner, "United States -- Rationing," p. 552, and Allison Danzig, "Football," pp. 187-88, in William W. Beardsley, ed., 1944 Collier's Year Book, Covering Events of the Year 1943 (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1944).


Harold Henderson, "Ration Books and Encyclopedia Annuals," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Not All History Is Created Equal

World War II brought 20,000 jobs to rural La Porte County, where the county seat had a total population of only 16,000. Workers commuted up to 90 miles round trip per day to assemble explosive shells. The Kingsbury ordnance plant did hire black workers, largely from Gary, but it segregated them in lowly jobs (and separate bomb shelters!) and discriminated against them in workplace discipline. Nor were they allowed to live in the "new town" of Kingsford Heights near the plant.

Historian Katherine Turk has documented the situation in the new issue of the Indiana Magazine of History, drawing among other sources on files of employee letters to President and Mrs. Roosevelt and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, held at the National Archives in Chicago. It's not a pretty picture, and not one you'll hear much about in La Porte County today.

Turk's research interest is in documenting that the African American women's logic involved both equality and fairness, whereas later anti-discrimination laws tended to leave out the fairness part. My interest is in the power of local forgetting: how little is remembered of the virulent white racism that led the government bureaucrats and the contracting company alike to discriminate against black workers and lie to them about it. (Most responses to complaints were pro forma; one woman was turned away because the company doctor said she had high blood pressure, which her own doctor documented was not the case.) The plant would recruit as far away as North Dakota and Georgia rather than allow a black person to work in a job designated for whites.

Placing our ancestors in historical context involves being aware of uncomfortable issues and situations that now go unmentioned. Sometimes it takes an outside historian to pay attention to a part of the picture that local historians turn away from.



Katherine Turk, "'A Fair Chance To Do My Part of Work': Black Women, War Work, and Rights Claims at the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant," Indiana Magazine of Hisotry, vol. 108, no. 3 (September 2012): 209-44.

Harold Henderson, "Not All History Is Created Equal," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 27 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Does History Comfort Us?

If history is comforting, writes an anonymous historian, it's probably not very good history.

History is meant to make you uncomfortable. Clio, the muse of history, is like Jesus: she brings not peace but a sword. She will make you rethink everything you think you know; everything you think you hold dear; she will make you question everything. Everything you were brought up with; everything you thought natural. She’s not here to wrap you in cotton wool and say ‘there, there’ everything is just how it’s supposed to be. She’s not there to bring succour to your view of your country, or smooth over the bad stuff that it did, or to soothe your conscience about the massacres perpetuated in the name of your religion, or the slaughter committed by people who at least claimed to share your political beliefs. She’s there to make you uneasy. She’s there to stop you from falling victim to her evil twin, Myth. In a sense I want to free you from feeling like the past controls us; that we have to base our identities in the present upon myths. That means we don’t have to feel guilty or apologise, either – just to be aware; to understand.

This historian teaches medieval history; an example from WW2 Indiana tomorrow.



"Professor Grumpy's Historical Manifesto," Historian on the Edge, posted 12 October 2012 (http://600transformer.blogspot.in/2012/10/professor-grumpys-historical-manifesto.html : accessed 25 October 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Does History Comfort Us?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 26 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Right Map for the Road Trip

On any genealogy research trip, there's always something I wish I had thought to bring. Sometimes it's a piece of equipment like a charge cord for the cell phone. More often it's a piece of information that I forgot to upload, or I'm in a place where I need it on paper because there's no wi-fi.

Yesterday I was grateful to have brought along a must-have for anyone planning to work on tax lists or property records (I had both): a good map of the subdivisions of the county I was working on, which in the case of Michigan means a township map. And Michigan has a lovely one; I wish every state did it this well. Unless you know by heart the township and range of every township in your federal-land county, you need it too. How else will you realize (for instance) that the 1875 tax list is organized by township, not alphabetically but in order from the southeast corner to the northwest corner?!

Actually I could have used one other thing -- a list of all the former names of townships. But since only one or two had changed, there was a workaround.


Harold Henderson, "The Right Map for the Road Trip," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 25 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]