Genealogy is like a jigsaw puzzle, but you don't have the box top, so you don't know what the picture is supposed to look like. As you start putting the puzzle together, you realize some pieces are missing, and eventually you figure out that some of the pieces you started with don't actually belong to this puzzle. I'll help you discover the right pieces for your puzzle and assemble them into a picture of your family.
Showing posts with label Illinois. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Illinois. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 16, 2020
Wednesday, July 8, 2020
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Wednesday, February 20, 2019
Wednesday, November 21, 2018
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
Hooray for Newspapers!
Lucky for us researchers, almost all of the newspapers added have free access. The exception is the Friedens Messenger, for which you need to be a paid member of the St. Louis Genealogical society.
• Hungary: Although the newspaper itself has closed down, the online archive of Népszabadság is being maintained for free access. I don't read Hungarian, however, and I can't figure out what years are covered.
• Korea (new country!): Yes, you read that right, Korea. Not North or South, but just plain old Korea. The National Library of Korea (in South Korea) has an online collection of newspapers published in Korea prior to 1950. The link I posted is to the English-language interface, but the newspapers are in Korean.
• Mexico: El Universal is online for 1999 to the present.
• Sierra Leone: I discovered that Early Dawn, available on FultonHistory.com and incorrectly labeled as "Earley Dawn", is also on the Internet Archive and much easier to read, although the site notes that some issues are missing.
• California: The Monterey Public Library has digitized its historical newspaper collection and placed it online for free. The 34 newspapers range from 1846 to the present. They are listed on the library's site in chronological order, which is a little different.
• Florida: The Weekly Challenger, the newspaper of the black community of St. Petersburg, has partnered with the University of South Florida at St. Petersburg, which is now hosting digitized issues of the paper for 1976, 1985–1988, and 2009–2016. Plans are to to digitize more historic issues and add them to the online archive.
• Idaho: The University of Idaho has digitized the historical run of Argonaut, the student newspaper, and posted it online.
• Illinois: The Aurora Public Library has online indices for the Aurora Beacon-News for obituaries (1933–2004 with many gaps) and for a clipping collection (1925–1956 and 1963–1978).
• Illinois: The Coal City Public Library has a searchable index for obituaries and death notices, most of which came from the Coal City Courant newspaper. The index can be searched only by surname, and nothing on the page indicates what years the database covers. I searched for Smith as a general test, and years ranged from 1884 to 2017.
• Kansas: The Rossville Community Library not only has posted an obituary index online, it has gone the extra step and scanned and posted the obituaries listed in the index.
• Massachusetts: Smith College has placed every issue of its alumnae quarterly, for 1909 to the present, online.
• Michigan: Oakland County has an online historical archive site which houses what appears to be a substantial collection of digitized newspapers. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to determine the names of the newspapers in the collection or what years it covers. Seventy-four locations are listed on the browse page.
• Michigan: The University of Michigan has an online archive of the historical run of the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily.
• Missouri: The St. Louis Genealogical Society has posted issue of the Friedens Messenger, published by the Friedens United Church of Christ, for 1940 and earlier, although the range is not specified. Paid members of the society may view the digitized files.
• New Jersey: The Elizabeth Daily Journal for 1872–1915 (with more years to be digitized and posted online) is available courtesy of the Elizabeth Public Library.
• New York: The entire run of the New Yorker, all the way back to 1925, is now available through the New York Public Library site with a library card.
• Ohio: The Lepper Public Library has a collection of seventeen newspapers covering the Lisbon (formerly New Lisbon) area, ranging from 1810 to 2011 (with a lot of gaps).
• Ohio: The Ohio National Guard has shifted its publication, The Buckeye Guard, from print to digital and has posted the archives of the print edition (1976–2011) on its new site.
• Ohio: The Salem Public Library has an obituary index for 1938–2016 for the Salem News and will send you a copy of the obituary. It also has the "Yesteryears" section of the News for 1991–2002 online.
• Ohio: The Warren–Trumbull County Public Library has two indices for obituaries: The Warren Tribune Chronicle for 1900–1949 and the Youngstown Vindicator for 2011–2014.
• Pennsylvania: Elizabethtown College has digitized its students newspapers, Our College Times (1904–1934) and The Etownian (1934–2009), and uploaded them to the Internet Archive.
• Tennessee: A near-complete archive of the original incarnation of Confederate Veteran magazine, from 1893–1932, including a searchable index, can be found on the Internet Archive. I placed it under Tennessee because that's where it was published.
• Texas: The Texas Obituary Project is a collection of scanned obits from LGBT publications, dating back to 1975.
• Wisconsin: The complete historical run of the print version of the UWM Post, the student newspaper of the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, has been digitized.
• Multistate: The Catholic News Archive currently has nine newspapers (including one issue from 1832!) from five different states and the United States in general. This is a Veridian site (yay!), and more newspapers will be added over time.
• Multistate: FamilySearch.org now has a database of GenealogyBank obituaries from 1980–2014. Even though GenealogyBank itself is a pay site, this collection is free.
• Worldwide: Catholic Newspapers Online is a portal collecting links to Catholic newspapers from multiple countries, both historical and current, and has 22 pages of links so far.
• Worldwide: "Last Seen: Finding Family after Slavery" is a collection of ads posted in newspapers after Emancipation, where people tried to find relatives from whom they had been separated, whether by slavery, escape, or the military. Currently the volunteer effort includes notices one Canadian and thirteen U.S. newspapers, but the project continually grows.
• Worldwide: The Mennonite Library and Archives in Kansas has placed online a large collection of German-language newspapers and other publications from German Mennonites. The countries include Canada and Paraguay!
Tuesday, April 18, 2017
National Volunteer Week: What Can You Do to Help?
National Volunteer Week is a week of observance in the United States and Canada designed to spotlight the contributions volunteers make and to thank them for their efforts. In 2017 it will run from April 23 through April 29. In my little corner of the family history blog world, I regularly post about ways in which people can volunteer their time, talents, and more to help with various genealogy and history projects. So in honor of next week's event, it seemed like a good time to help publicize opportunities to help out.
A historian is researching the history of personal ads in the United States. She is looking for information about couples who met each other through a personal ad published in a newspaper any time between 1750 and 1950. If one of your ancestors or another family member met a husband or wife through a personal ad, or if you know of someone else who did, Francesca Beauman would love to hear the story. You can contact her by e-mail at francescabeauman@gmail.com. All information that is shared with her will be treated with the strictest confidence.
Researcher Mark Sy is working on a project about Dr. Ho Feng-Shan, a Chinese diplomat during World War II who issued thousands of exit visas to Austrian Jews fleeing the country after the Nazi invasion. Sy would like to communicate with survivors who received these visas, or their descendants, to learn about their plights and experiences during that time. This could be anyone who was living in Vienna from 1938–1940 and received a visa. Many of the refugees exiled to Shanghai ended up settling in North America, as several documents of survivors obtained from Yad Vashem and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center reference early U.S. postal codes and New York ZIP Codes. Interviews so far have been conducted with individuals based in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Melbourne, but survivors and their descendants could be anywhere in the world. Please contact Mark at marksy85@gmail.com.
How much do you know about Colorado history? Maybe you can help solve the mystery of the woman in the portrait. At the Colorado State Archives, while cleaning up after a leak in a storage area, several old portraits of former Colorado governors were found, along with one portrait of a woman. The problem is that no one has any idea who the woman is. The local NBC affiliate covered the story, and the reporter posted about it on his Facebook page, but so far no one has come up with the answer.
Speaking of history, the Pioneer Village Museum in Beausejour, Manitoba is asking people to help identify early 20th-century photographs from the area, about 30 miles east of Winnipeg. The photographs are being scanned from negatives that were donated to the museum after the woman who had them passed away. So far the photos appear to range from about 1900 to the 1930's. One man actually recognized himself in a photo! The museum is looking for identification of people or locations in the photographs, which are being posted to Facebook.
Another repository seeking help in identifying people in photographs is the Oak Ridge Public Library in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The photos were taken by resident Ruth Carey from the 1960's to April 1994 and were donated to the library, along with many undeveloped negatives, by Carey's daughter. Some of the prints and negatives have been digitized, but the majority have not and must be viewed in person at the library. Carey apparently was Jewish, and a good number of the photographs are of the Jewish community in Oak Ridge.
About 30 some odd years ago, a man living in Hrodna, Belarus (formerly Grodno in Russia and Poland) discovered two albums with photographs and letters in the attic of the building in which he was living. Some of the photos have writing in Polish and Hebrew, and the names Konchuk/Kanchuck and Vazvutski appear. The items were likely left in the building, which seems to have been in the Jewish section of the city, before or during World War II. The man is now trying to find family members to return the items. There's a long article in Byelorusian about the story (here's the Google Translate version), but apparently without contact information. A woman who has posted about this on Facebook seems to be functioning as a contact person.
Two more photos that are currently unidentified arrived at the Belleville (Illinois) Labor & Industry Museum with a donation of printing materials. Each of the photographs is of an individual (one man, one woman) laid out in a casket for viewing. The museum is asking people to look at the photos and call if they can provide any information.
This year, the West Midlands Police (main office in Birmingham, England) celebrates the 100th anniversary of its first female officers, who joined the force in April 1917. Three female officers in an archive photograph are unidentified, and files on four of the early officers have not survived. The force is looking for help from the public in identifying the unknown faces in the photo and in gathering any information on these pioneering policewomen.
Not all photographs are unidentified, which is a good thing. If you have any family connections to Truro, Nova Scotia, particularly from 1967 to the late 1980's, you might want to contact Carsand Photo Imaging. The company is owned by the son of the late Carson Yorke, who founded Carsand-Mosher Photographic. The elder Yorke kept all the negatives of portraits he took during the aforementioned years, and his son, Colin Yorke, is now trying to reunite images with families. Colin Yorke is apparently taking contacts primarily through his company's Facebook page, but you should be able to get in touch with him through the company's Web site if you don't use Facebook.
The University of South Florida at St. Petersburg is looking for donations of back issues of The Weekly Challenger, the historic black newspaper of Pinellas County, from 1967 through the 1990's. Even clippings can be helpful. The newspapers will be digitized to create an archive. Contact information is in the article linked above, as is a link to a recording of a lecture about the Weekly Challenger digital initiative.
When I teach about online newspapers, I discuss the problems that optical character recognition (OCR) software has with reading old newspapers due to ink bleed, typeface dropout, damaged pages, and other problems. Something I've never considered is whether the software has problems recognizing old fonts. That issue apparently did arise for Iowa State University when it digitized its yearbooks for 1894–1994 (except 1902). Because of that, and to have the content be more accessible (as in ADA) online, Iowa State is asking volunteers to help "Transcribe the 'Bomb' " (the name of the yearbook is The Bomb). An article has information about the digitization project and a link to the volunteer site.
Dr. Ciaran Reilly is coordinating the Irish Famine Eviction Project to document evidence of evictions between 1845 and 1851. His vision is to create a dedicated online resource listing GPS coordinates for famine eviction sites and to create a better understanding of the people involved in the evictions. It is hoped that the project will shed new light on numbers, locations, and background stories of those involved.
Sponsored by Irish Newspaper Archives, the project will use primary and secondary source information to research, gather, and catalog evictions. One of the goals is to collaborate with individuals, societies, and libraries across the world. The project is looking for any information about evictions, locations, and local folklore.
To see the 500 sites that have been mapped so far, visit https://irishfamineeviction.com/eviction-map/. To submit your own research for inclusion in the project, e-mail your findings to famineeviction@gmail.com or tweet @famineeviction.
Writer David Wolman wants to have a huge party with descendants of the approximately 600 passengers (most of whom were Irish) rescued from the sinking ship Connaught in October 1860. Failing that, he would at least like to make contact with any of those descendants. Wolman recently published a story about the rescue of the Connaught's passengers and a modern-day treasure hunter who wanted to find the shipwreck, and issued an invitation to contact him via e-mail or Twitter. A list of the passengers is in a New York Times article available online.
I don't usually post stories that have already appeared on Eastman's blog, because he has much, much wider readership than I do, but this one is important enough that I felt I should (because I know not everyone reads Eastman). Extreme Relic Hunters, a company that specializes in World War I and World War II relic retrieval, discovered a huge cache of WWII dog tags (more than 12,000!). The majority are from British servicemen, but there are some from other countries. Of the British, almost all are from Royal Armoured Corps, Royal Tank Regiment, or Reconnaissance, with no RAF or Navy personnel. The guys from the company want to reunite as many of these dog tags with family members as humanly possible (one was returned to the veteran himself). You can read about the discovery and the project to return the dog tags on the Forces War Records and the Extreme Relic Hunters sites. Oh, and Extreme Relic Hunters is looking for volunteers to help them with the return project; they're just a little overwhelmed.
If you have not read about it yet, well known genealogy speaker Thomas MacEntee has posted a survey to learn what family historians and genealogists think of the industry today and what they would like it to be. Read about it here and then click the link to take the survey. He promises that your e-mail address will not be saved and you will not be contacted.
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| Ho Feng-Shan |
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How much do you know about Colorado history? Maybe you can help solve the mystery of the woman in the portrait. At the Colorado State Archives, while cleaning up after a leak in a storage area, several old portraits of former Colorado governors were found, along with one portrait of a woman. The problem is that no one has any idea who the woman is. The local NBC affiliate covered the story, and the reporter posted about it on his Facebook page, but so far no one has come up with the answer.
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Another repository seeking help in identifying people in photographs is the Oak Ridge Public Library in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The photos were taken by resident Ruth Carey from the 1960's to April 1994 and were donated to the library, along with many undeveloped negatives, by Carey's daughter. Some of the prints and negatives have been digitized, but the majority have not and must be viewed in person at the library. Carey apparently was Jewish, and a good number of the photographs are of the Jewish community in Oak Ridge.
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Two more photos that are currently unidentified arrived at the Belleville (Illinois) Labor & Industry Museum with a donation of printing materials. Each of the photographs is of an individual (one man, one woman) laid out in a casket for viewing. The museum is asking people to look at the photos and call if they can provide any information.
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Not all photographs are unidentified, which is a good thing. If you have any family connections to Truro, Nova Scotia, particularly from 1967 to the late 1980's, you might want to contact Carsand Photo Imaging. The company is owned by the son of the late Carson Yorke, who founded Carsand-Mosher Photographic. The elder Yorke kept all the negatives of portraits he took during the aforementioned years, and his son, Colin Yorke, is now trying to reunite images with families. Colin Yorke is apparently taking contacts primarily through his company's Facebook page, but you should be able to get in touch with him through the company's Web site if you don't use Facebook.
-- >< -- >< -- >< -- >< --
The University of South Florida at St. Petersburg is looking for donations of back issues of The Weekly Challenger, the historic black newspaper of Pinellas County, from 1967 through the 1990's. Even clippings can be helpful. The newspapers will be digitized to create an archive. Contact information is in the article linked above, as is a link to a recording of a lecture about the Weekly Challenger digital initiative.
-- >< -- >< -- >< -- >< --
-- >< -- >< -- >< -- >< --
Dr. Ciaran Reilly is coordinating the Irish Famine Eviction Project to document evidence of evictions between 1845 and 1851. His vision is to create a dedicated online resource listing GPS coordinates for famine eviction sites and to create a better understanding of the people involved in the evictions. It is hoped that the project will shed new light on numbers, locations, and background stories of those involved.
Sponsored by Irish Newspaper Archives, the project will use primary and secondary source information to research, gather, and catalog evictions. One of the goals is to collaborate with individuals, societies, and libraries across the world. The project is looking for any information about evictions, locations, and local folklore.
To see the 500 sites that have been mapped so far, visit https://irishfamineeviction.com/eviction-map/. To submit your own research for inclusion in the project, e-mail your findings to famineeviction@gmail.com or tweet @famineeviction.
-- >< -- >< -- >< -- >< --
Writer David Wolman wants to have a huge party with descendants of the approximately 600 passengers (most of whom were Irish) rescued from the sinking ship Connaught in October 1860. Failing that, he would at least like to make contact with any of those descendants. Wolman recently published a story about the rescue of the Connaught's passengers and a modern-day treasure hunter who wanted to find the shipwreck, and issued an invitation to contact him via e-mail or Twitter. A list of the passengers is in a New York Times article available online.
-- >< -- >< -- >< -- >< --
-- >< -- >< -- >< -- >< --
If you have not read about it yet, well known genealogy speaker Thomas MacEntee has posted a survey to learn what family historians and genealogists think of the industry today and what they would like it to be. Read about it here and then click the link to take the survey. He promises that your e-mail address will not be saved and you will not be contacted.
Sunday, May 15, 2016
"Who Do You Think You Are?" - Chris Noth
All of that notwithstanding, the first episode of the double header was Chris Noth, who at least is roughly my generation even if I hadn't heard of him previously. The teaser told us that Noth would trace his father's family back to a devastating catastrophe. He would find an Irish ancestor who suffered severe oppression before going to fight in Spain in one of the fiercest battles of all time and then becoming a war hero.
The introduction to the episode tells us that Chris Noth has enjoyed a long, distinguished career in television, film, and stage. His first major role was as Mike Logan on Law & Order (which I used to watch, but only for Jerry Orbach), and he portrayed Mr. Big (that's a character name?) on Sex and the City (which I've still never seen, but at least I recognized Kim Cattrall's name). He currently stars on the CBS show The Good Wife. (I think the definition of "distinguished" is being stretched a little here.) In 2012 he married his long-time girlfriend, Tara Wilson, and they are raising their son in Los Angeles (Noth's Wikipedia page says that Orion was born in 2008, before the marriage).
Noth's first comments are about his son. He has come to fatherhood late but it's great. He is always learning something new through Orion's eyes.
Thinking about his own childhood, Noth says he was born November 13, 1954 in Madison, Wisconsin to Jeanne Parr and Charles James Noth. His father was a military man and was in the Navy in World War II, which is where he met Parr. He served during the entire Korean War on the carrier Antietam and earned medals for his bravery. After his military service he and Jeanne worked on raising a family.
Noth is the youngest of three boys. His father worked for an insurance company. He didn't love the job but did it for his family. His mother had a successful career in broadcasting and was a popular news correspondent for CBS. His parents separated when he was about 9–10 years old, and his father died in a car accident in 1966.
Noth wishes his father would have lived so he could have known and talked to him as an adult. Because of his father's early death, it was like a complete separation from his father's side of the family, and he has few details on his paternal grandparents. His grandmother was Nonna Mae, and his grandfather George was apparently a millionaire who belonged to a country club. George died before Noth was born, but he has dim memories of Nonna Mae, whom he liked. He saw her for two weeks once in Chicago on a family trip. He thinks her maiden name might have been McGuire, which might make her Irish.
Noth wants to do his family history now before it's too late for himself and his son. It's a great thing to know your roots, and it's better to learn at a young age, instead of having gaps as Noth does.
With no family members to talk to beforehand, Noth starts by going directly to Chicago, where his father's family lived. He says he is meeting genealogist Kyle Betit (one of the stalwarts of Ancestry.com's ProGenealogists arm) at the Illinois Regional Archives Depository (IRAD), which therefore means he must be at Northeastern Illinois University. They start by looking for information about Noth's father. Betit suggests they might be able to find his birth certificate on the Cook County Genealogy site (wow! how much did that product placement cost? no comment about it being a pay site, however). Noth thinks his father was born about 1924–1925, but somehow they manage to find him, even though he was born January 16, 1922 in the Presbyterian Hospital. (It's nice that Charles Noth was findable in the index. That index has tons of problems, and I often have to write to Cook County for records because I can't find someone on the site.) Charles Noth's parents were George Joseph Noth and Mary McGuire. Noth figures Mae easily could have come from Mary. The birth certificate also says that George was born in Davenport, Iowa; Mary was born in Chicago; and they were living at 200 South Ellwood Avenue, Oak Park.
Emboldened by this easy success, Noth asks what else they can find. Betit disingenuously suggests that since George was supposed to have been a prominent person, they can try looking at newspapers for a marriage announcement. (Seriously? This is what you propose as a logical next step?) And then he suggests they go to an Ancestry site, Newspapers.com. Noth searches for "George J. Noth" (gee, Betit doesn't know something's there, does he?), and of course finds an article, "The Whirl of Society." They do not state the date or the name of the newspaper (Chicago Inter Ocean, September 21, 1910), but we are told that Mae was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C. J. McGuire and the marriage took place in the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows", about which Noth says, "What a name for a church." (Not mentioned was that Mae's brother had died recently.)
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| "The Whirl of Society", Chicago Inter Ocean, September 21, 1910, page 9 (edited image) |
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| United Staters 1900 Federal Census, West Town, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, June 5, 1900, Enumeration District 345, page 5A, lines 18–28 |
Noth wants to know if they can go back further, and just how far they can go. Betit says (incorrectly) that the 1890 census was completely destroyed (most of it was destroyed, but more than 6,000 names survived, and at least some of those 6,000+ individuals must be related to people living today, so don't discount that census so readily!), so they can jump back 20 years and look at 1880. This time he has Noth search on the 1880 census page (much better). Noth finds Charles, who is only 25 years old, in Chicago, living with his sister Agnes and brother John. Noth asks why the three are living alone without their parents and says, "I have a bad feeling about those kids," in a tone heavy with foreboding before the cut to a commercial. When the program returns, the two men look at some of the details on the census: Charles was working as a teamster, and the "street" given for the homes on that census page is "Scattered houses on Prairie", which Betit has no explanation for; he's never seen an address like that. (I don't see what the problem is here. The enumeration district, 118, is given on the census page. The description of that enumeration district, per Ancestry.com, is "North by the south side of Barry Point road, Van Buren sts, and Jackson, East by West side of Western Avenue, south by the north side of 12th Street, west by the east side of Crawford Ave (City limits)." It specifically says the ED was within the city limits. There was a Prairie Avenue in Chicago in 1880. Couldn't the notation simply mean not many houses were on that street? But maybe he was told to feign ignorance because it wasn't his job in the episode to talk about why there weren't many houses on the street.)
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| United States 1880 Federal Census, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, June 16, 1880, Enumeration District 118, page 57 (written)/236A (printed), lines 6–8 |
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| United States 1870 Federal Census, 20th Ward, Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, June 28, 1870, page 101 (written)/376 (printed), lines 16–22 |
Before he leaves, Noth asks, "Can I ask you something?" Of course Betit says yes, and Noth follows up with, "Do you think we can find out who the original McGuire was from Ireland?" Betit says he'll do some more digging and let him know if he finds anything. Even though Noth really did ask this, I'm surprised it wasn't edited out, because we had just seen in the 1870 census that Dennis McGuire was born in Ireland. Doesn't that make him the original McGuire Noth is asking about? It could be that what Noth meant was if they could find from where he came in Ireland, but that's not the question he asked, or maybe that question was edited out.
On his way toward the Chicago History Museum, Noth says he feels like something dramatic happened to the family between 1870 and 1880. He really wants to solve the mystery. At the museum, John Russick, the museum's Vice President of Interpretation and Education, is waiting to greet him. He says he has pulled some relevant material and begins by showing Noth an image of Chicago as a bustling city from an 1871 issue of Harper's Weekly (to be specific, pages 984–985 in the October 21, 1871 issue). A search in Chicago city directories had shown that the McGuire family lived on North La Salle Street in the 20th Ward, which lay along the north side of the main branch of the Chicago River in a residential area, and Russick indicates the approximate area on the image (on the right side of the river in the illustration; the perspective is from the east). It makes sense that the McGuires would have lived there, as Dennis might have worked nearby at a warehouse, offloading items from boats.
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| Harper's Weekly, Volume 15, October 21, 1871, pages 984–985 |
Russick has Noth look at page 1008 in the book he is holding, which depicts the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 (this was from the Harper's Weekly of October 28, 1871). It affected the entire city, much of which was burnt to the ground. The center of the city was gone. And the 20th Ward was right in the middle of it. La Salle Street was utterly destroyed. (The program cut to a commercial after this, and when it returned, we got to see a lovely shot of the La Salle Street Bridge.)
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| Harper's Weekly, Volume 15, October 28, 1871, pages 1008–1009 |
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| Harper's Weekly, Volume 15, October 28, 1871, page 1004 |
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| Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, March 14, 1892, page 7 |
As he leaves the museum, Noth focuses first on the fact that they don't know what happened to Dennis. He also didn't learn why Ann split off. This is a haunting side of his family. He didn't have conversations about family history growing up (maybe this history is part of the reason why?). Before he gets too depressed about it, though, he receives an e-mail message from Betit, who has "just discovered" that Dennis' father, John McGuire (Noth's 3x-great-grandfather), was Irish but served in the British army.
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I continued researching your McGuire family's Irish roots and found that the McGuires left Ireland for Canada in 1847, —— [I am missing a few words, which did not appear on screen] Dennis and Ann moving on to Chicago around 1864. Like so many other Irish immigrants, the McGuires likely left Ireland to escape the Potato Famine. Their immigration story is very typical of Irish families of the time.
During my search, I was also able to identify Dennis' father — your 3x great-grandfather — John McGuire in combing through Canadian records. I located an 1880 record from the Ottawa area that may be helpful to you.
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| [John McGuire death record, page 393, Schedule C, County of Carleton, Division of Cloucester, Registrations of Deaths, 1869-1938; Archives of Ontario (edited image)] |
To learn more about your 3x great-grandfather, John McGuire, you should go to the National Archives in London, to delve into the original British pension records. Because the British government keeps detailed records, there's a good possibility you can find out quite a bit about the McGuire family. This is a rare opportunity given the patchy records one usually encounters when researching Irish immigrants!
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The information about McGuire's death is shown only briefly on screen, and Noth does not read any of it aloud. Noth is happy to read about McGuire being a soldier, because that makes him military like his father. Then he says it runs in the family, which is stretching it a little (ok, a lot, with more than 150 years between their service). Since Betit says that to learn more he should visit The National Archives (yes, the Brits really do insist on that capital "T"; Betit didn't type it correctly according to their preferences) in London, that's where Noth goes next.
London is the only location where Noth does not drive himself around. (I drove a car in London; it wasn't that bad.) Heading to his meeting, Noth says he wants to know what John did in the army — whether he was a common soldier, where he lived, any wars he fought in. He heads to a basement archive at TNA (in Kew, a suburban district of London), where Captain Graham Bandy, a military historian and genealogist, greets him. Bandy has a book of pension records ready for Noth to look at. He comments that, notwithstanding the proverb about an army marching on its stomach, "the British Army marches on paperwork." Noth looks at a pension document for Private John McGuire, who was a foot soldier. Noth is surprised that he is handling the actual original documents. McGuire was born in County Cavan and enlisted in County Limerick. His enlisted first in the 96th Infantry, on May 1, 1808, and finished with that unit on December 9, 1818. He then went to the 44th Infantry, enlisting on December 10, 1818 and leaving on September 24, 1822. He served for more than 14 years; the image is not shown in its entirety, but I saw "14 years one hundred." (According to timeanddate.com, it was 14 years, 147 days.) From this small amount of information, Noth decides that McGuire must have been a tough SOB (except he didn't use the initials).
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| first page of John McGuire's pension |
The narrator explains that in 1799 Napoleon seized power in France and set out on a series of military conquests to gain control over continental Europe. Due to the strength of the British naval forces, Napoleon didn't think he could invade the British Isles. Instead he decided to hurt the British economy by trying to block trade through controlling access to the Mediterranean and to ports in Spain and Portugal. In 1870 he invaded Portugal, thus beginning the Peninsular War. To protect its allies and its economy, Britain sent thousands of troops, including McGuire, to fight.
Bandy now has an old book which turns out to be quarterly pay lists. (Sometime around this point the producers of the program decided that Bandy was unintelligible and needed to be subtitled for the American viewing public to understand him. That seems to say worlds about what the producers think of their audience. I had no trouble understanding him.) Noth has to use a magnifying glass to read the handwriting (the reading glasses he has been using off and on when looking at computer screens apparently were not up to the task). A page titled "Infantry Abroad" indicates that McGuire was in the 97th Queen's Own, 10th Company, which Bandy says would have been a "light" company, with skirmishers and marksmen. Bandy adds that the 97th and the 96th were really the same unit, the 96th having been renumbered. McGuire was in a "camp near Elvas", in eastern Portugal, from March 25 to June 24, 1811. Noth wants to know if there was a battle there and whether McGuire was involved in fighting. Bandy tells him that to find out more, he should go to Portugal, where he can meet a military historian. In one of those rare totally honest comments we sometimes hear on the program, Noth grins and says cheerfully, "I don't mind going to Portugal!"
As he departs TNA, Noth says McGuire was quite a soldier, spending 14 years in the army. (Ha! In the Sellers line, one man was in the U.S. Army 40 years, and his son was in the Navy even longer.) In Portugal he'll find out what kind of soldier McGuire was.
Driving to meet his new expert, Noth muses that if someone had told him he would be going to Portugal to find out about his ancestry, he would have said, "You're nuts!" Looking around at the scenery, he wonders if the olive trees were part of what McGuire saw. Being in the army would have carried a certain amount of excitement but also included hardships. It has become clear to Noth that if John McGuire had not survived, Noth would not be there. He says that Peninsula War expert Mark Crathorne has looked up information on McGuire and has set up a meeting with him at La Albuera, a town about 25 miles from Elvas, just over the Spanish border.
In the middle of an open field, Noth meets military historian Crathorne of the British Historical Society of Portugal. (Crathorne was also at one point the British Consul in Lisbon.) Crathorne explains that where the two men are standing was where the Battle of Albuera, known as Bloody Albuera, took place. He talks Noth through the battle sequence. The British army here, which included McGuire, was ready to chase the French out of the Iberian Peninsula. Everyone was involved in the battle.
The narrator pops in again, this time to say that Albuera was one of the bloodiest battles of the Peninsula War. It involved 34,000 European allies versus 24,000 French troops An early French assault was devastating and caused a lot of bloodshed. Two full French regiments conducted a sneak attack and butchered a brigade of British soldiers. After several hours the British brought in one last division, which included McGuire's company.
So McGuire was in the action, and the battle was not going well. To the right of where Noth and Crathorne are standing, from across the crest of the hill, 200 French dragoons were coming at a full gallop. Noth asks what a French dragoon is, and Crathorne obligingly tells him they were soldiers with heavy sabers riding on horses. They would have been coming straight toward McGuire and his company. Noth says that the men probably shot and ran to a different position, but Crathorne corrects him — they would have held their positions, near their companions, shoulder to shoulder, with their muskets primed and their bayonets fixed and ready.
As if that weren't bad enough, worse was to come. Crathorne describes the sounds of battle in detail. As the two sides moved toward each other, the question was who could fire more often. The British could fire three volleys per minute, while the French could only manage two to two and a half in a minute. The British had the advantage.
Crathorne says the two sides were only 20 yards away, and Noth calls out, "Hold on," and runs about that distance to get a better understanding of how close that really was. The British lines would have been firing and moving backward, while the French fired and advanced toward them. He feels it was almost Medieval, to see the faces of the men you were killing. This particular engagement was the turning point of the battle. If McGuire's division had not stood firm, the battle would have gone the other way. But they did, and the French retreated. The British had won, but at a cost — 10,000 men were dead. Death was everywhere, with blood on the fields and the groans of the dying. The Battle of Albuera was the beginning of the end for Napoleon's troops. Noth feels this is sacred ground and takes some small stones for his son.
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| Map of the Battle of Albuera, from |
In County Cavan Noth goes to the Johnston Central Library, where he meets military historian David Murphy of Maynooth University. (Murphy is subtitled for all of his dialog. I again had no trouble understanding him. Maybe the producers were the ones who had problems.) Murphy has the Cavan Regiment of Militia Adjutant's Roll to April 24, 1809. The militia was somewhat similar to the U.S. National Guard. It was a unit raised from local men. Its main purpose was to protect against French invasion and rebellion (somehow I suspect they were more worried about the latter than the former). Ireland did not have a national police force, so the militia also took care of things such as civil unrest. Murphy says that McGuire joined the Cavan militia in November 1807. Then he signed up for the Cavan regiment in the regular army and headed to Spain. (But earlier we saw McGuire's pension form, which showed that he enlisted on May 1, 1808. I don't know why there is a discrepancy in the dates.) When the army needed manpower, recruiters would come to town and sell young men on enlisting; not much has changed during the past 200 years.
Looking down the list of men on the Adjutant's roll, Noth says, "I'm pretty good at finding his name, usually," and then does find McGuire. His occupation had been linen weaver, which Murphy explains would have been weaving flax into linen, probably to make garments and blankets. The work would not have been in a factory but was a small operation, likely a workshop with two or three men. When England and Belfast started building big mills, in the early years of industrialization, small operators would have been squeezed out. Then McGuire's options would have been few. As a Catholic, he was not eligible for government jobs because of the Penal Laws. These regulations also prevented Catholics (and Protestant dissenters) from owning land (they could only lease), going to university — such as Protestant-owned Trinity University in Dublin (from which Murphy received his Ph.D.) — and working as doctors and lawyers. At first Catholics were banned from the army, but when the Crown needed soldiers, suddenly recruiters fell all over them.
Noth is Catholic (even if he's never heard of Our Lady of Sorrows) and is disturbed to hear about the laws. He asks if McGuire would at least have had a church to go to, but no, that was restricted also. (What Murphy doesn't say is that existing Catholic churches were taken over by the Church of Ireland, the Irish equivalent of the Church of England.) Noth is very upset: "They can't even have a church to go to — it makes me mad."
So McGuire went from unbelievable oppression to fighting for the British, who were the oppressors. Murphy admits it's complicated. He explains it was probably the first proper clothes and boots McGuire had owned. This was the reality of the time; the only choice was to work with the status quo. When he returned from his service in the army, things would still have been tough. But in the 1840's McGuire left for Canada, probably influenced at least in part by the potato famine. He had a military pension, which gave him more flexibility than most. It also was an opportunity for him to get his family and children out of Ireland.
The researchers were unable to find any information about McGuire's parents. There are no surviving records, and it's impossible to learn more. (This is not uncommon with Irish research.) Murphy tells Noth that McGuire was from just down the road in Knockbride, a "subarea" of the county of Cavan. Noth asks if there's a graveyard, and Murphy replies that it has only one. Noth wonders if maybe there's a McGuire in it, but Murphy says there are no markers. Many of the ones there have worn away and are now just rocks. It's possible that McGuire's parents and grandparents are buried in the graveyard, as it has been serving Knockbride since the 1400's. Tombstones or not, Noth will go to the cemetery: "That local graveyard, I think I'm gonna wanna see that."
Leaving the library, Noth says his only disappointment is that he was hoping for more personal details about John McGuire's family. (Unfortunately, the Canadian death record didn't include parents' names. Apparently they didn't find anything in the Drouin records? McGuire was Catholic, after all.) McGuire's circumstances were pretty rough; he was repressed by the political situation of the time and did what he had to do.
Noth calls the cemetery a "quintessential, quiet graveyard." There is moss on the stones, most of which are really nothing but rock at this point. McGuire knew this place and possibly buried his grandparents and parents here. There's a primitive but strong bond between the people and the place; the place defined them.
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| Noth looked at these old tombstones in Knockbride Cemetery. Image ©Eric Jones and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons License. |
While I was rewatching this episode I thought about logistics from the perspective of the celebrity. I'm guessing they're told to have an approximate number of days open. They're probably asked to make sure their passports are up-to-date, even though the occasional celeb doesn't travel outside the U.S., such as Lea Michele. Are they told that all the research has been done beforehand? Or do they figure it out? Does someone believe it when a researcher, such as Betit on this episode, says he'll continue to research and let Noth know if he finds anything else? Is that just part of the acting? I've done enough movie and TV gigs to know that not every shot can be accomplished in one take, so I'm sure that occasionally they have to redo a scene; that's one of the circumstances where acting will come into play, as the celebrity still pretends to be surprised/amazed/horrified/whatever emotion is appropriate. I don't think that the celebrity is told everything up front and then just acts through the entire episode, though.
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Online Newspaper Archive Round-up
I've been seeing many posts lately about college yearbooks being digitized, but that really is a different kind of publication. What do you think, should there be a Wikipedia page collecting listings of online archives of college yearbooks?
• Saskatchewan, Canada: The Saskatchewan Historic Newspapers Online collection has newspapers from many cities and towns, but I can't find a list of titles or dates that are covered.
• Canada (multiprovince): The Drouin Institute has links to an English-language page with transcribed obituaries, which is free. The Institute also has a paid subscription site which has newspaper images and many more records.
• England: The Middle East magazine, a well regarded journal about the Middle East, has an online archive covering 1974–2014, available only as an institutional subscription.
• Sierra Leone: The Earley Dawn, published in Bonthe from 1885–1892, has been digitized and is available on the FultonHistory.com site. Heaven knows where Tom Tryniski found this microfilm!
• United Kingdom: The Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps for 1903–present, plus index volumes for 1903–1965, is online. It seems to be free, but I'm not completely sure.
• California: The Hemet–San Jacinto Genealogical Society has an obituary index for the Hemet News, Press Enterprise, and Valley Chronicle, but no indication of the years covered.
• California: The J, the weekly Jewish newspaper for the San Francisco Bay Area, has an archive going back to 1995. The paper includes many wedding announcements, obituaries, and other life events.
• Georgia: The Callaway Beacon was a weekly magazine published for the employees and families of the Callaway Mills Company in LaGrange, Georgia. Issues from 1955 and 1957 are now online.
• Illinois: The Polish Genealogical Society of America has posted indices of death notices appearing in the Chicago Polish-language newspaper Dziennik Chicagoski, for 1890–1971. If you find an obituary you want, you can order a copy from the society,
• Indiana: The Hamilton East Public Library has a newspaper index for Hamilton County, with no list of years or titles covered. On the other hand, if you find a relevant article, they will send you a scan by e-mail for no charge.
• Michigan: The Michigan Digital Newspaper Portal has links to individual newspaper sites and also allows you to search the entire collection in one place.
• New York: The famous Yiddish newspaper The Forward/Forverts and two more Jewish newspapers published in New York have been added to the growing collection of Jewish newspapers on the National Library of Israel site. I do not read Yiddish, so I am not sure, but I think the paper is searchable in Yiddish.
• New York: A database of New York Evening Post death notices from 1801–1890 is in the collections at NEHGS.
• New York: The Ram, the Fordham University student paper, is online from about 1914–2008. It's hard to tell exactly what years are covered, as the dates are not displayed in order, even when I request the database to do so. I have found articles about one of my cousins who attended the dental school at Fordham in the paper.
• New York: The Troy Genealogical Society has added several more indices from newspapers: a marriage index from the Burden Iron Company, and death notices from Troy newspapers for 1797–1860. From the latter, notices for Revolutionary War soldiers and soldiers from other wars have separate lists online.
• Ohio: The Toledo–Lucas County Public Library has posted an obituary index for the Toledo Blade for 1837–present.
• Pennsylvania: Someone at the Adams Memorial Library has a sense of humor. The Latrobe Bulletin obituary index for 1902–present has been dubbed the "dead-a-base."
• South Dakota: South Dakota only recently was added to the Chronicling America collection, with five newspapers. Now 13 newspapers covering 1875–1919 are online.
• Multistate: Aviation Week & Space Technology has published an online archive of all of its issues, dating back to 1916.
• Multistate: The Garon family newspaper articles is a collection relating to that particular family and its related lines. The articles cover 1855–2013 and are mostly from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, but there are a lot of them with a wide range of subjects.
• Multistate: The Media History Digital Library is a growing collection of periodicals relating to the histories of the movie, broadcasting, and sound industries. One of the subcategories is even "Government and Law."
• Multistate and World: Newspapers in Microform is a Library of Congress catalog of newspapers published in the U.S. and around the world from 1948–1983, downloadable as three PDF files.
Other Newspaper News
The Chicago Tribune has a beta site for its new archive search engine, which is currently free to use. After the beta has finished, the site will become a paid subscription one. Coverage appears to be complete from 1857–1991, with some issues going back to 1849. There is also a FAQ page.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has created a contest for people to use the Chronicling America database. It wants people to create Web-based projects based on information from the newspapers in the database. Prizes are $5,000 for first, $3,00 for second, and $2,000 for third place, with separate prizes possible for K–12 contestants. The contest closes June 15, 2016.
NEH is also currently accepting proposals from institutions that would like to apply for grants to have their newspapers digitized and become part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. The deadline for receipt of proposals is January 14, 2016.
Wednesday, October 21, 2015
Black and White and Read All Over . . . .
Australia: The Ryerson Index contains publication information about more than 5 million death notices from 281 Australian newspapers, ranging from 1803 to the present. The majority of the entries are from New South Wales, but other parts of the country do have coverage.
Brazil: An older archive of Diario de Pernambuco, covering 1825–1924, is now available to go with the modern archive. Maybe at some point the mid-20th century will be added?
Brazil: The Diarios Oficiais ("Official Gazettes") of several cities and states are online.
British Columbia, Canada: There are three new links for British Columbia, one index and two sets of transcriptions. The index is for Victoria newspapers from 1858–1936 and includes BMD announcements, general news articles, and more. The Qualicum Beach Family History Society has transcribed obituaries from many newspapers in the Parkville and Qualicum area from 1948–1994. The second set of transcriptions is mostly BMD notices from British Columbia newspapers from 1861–1875.
Manitoba, Canada: The Manitoban, the student publication for the University of Manitoba, is available for 1914–2012. The Winnipeg Tribune archive currently covers 1890–1950, 1957–1960, and 1969, but there are plans to digitize and upload the missing years.
Québec, Canada: McGill University student publications from 1875–2001 are on Internet Archive. They include the McGill Gazette, McGill Fortnightly, McGill Outlook, Martlet, and McGill Daily.
Saskatchewan, Canada: The Saskatchewan Obituaries Project is digitized scrapbooks of obituary clippings.
Canada (national): The Drouin Institute has an online collection of transcribed obituaries from throughout Canada. The site and the obituaries are all in French.
China: Four more Shanghai papers published by the Jewish refugee community, three in German and one in English, have been added to Internet Archive.
Ireland: PDF's of bound volumes of the Dublin Gazette from the 1750's to around 1800 can be downloaded from the Oireachtas Library Web site. The Connolly Association has made available The Irish Democrat and its predecessor, Irish Freedom.
Japan: The entire run (1897–2014) of the Japan Times, an English-language newspaper, has been digitzed and is available as a paid subscription through an outside agency. This is probably designed as an institutional subscription only, but I can't find the site, only the marketing materials.
United Kingdom: A generous person has created two Google Custom Searches: one for all the national British newspapers, and a second that includes 384 local, city, and regional papers.
Arkansas: The Ashley County Ledger has an obituary index and transcriptions for 1965 to the present. The Pine Bluff/Jefferson County Library has an obituary index for local newspapers from the 1820's to the present.
Connecticut: The Ferguson Library has provided an index to obituaries appearing in seven Stamford newspapers from 1830 to the present.
Georgia: The Digital Library of Georgia has added two new collections: Southern Voice, an LGBT publication, for 1988–1995; and six West Georgia historic newspapers covering 1843–1942.
Hawaii: Two student publications from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa are now online: Ka Leo o Hawaiʻi, a newspaper, for 1922–1949 and 2002–2010; and Ka Palapala, kind of a student annual, for the 1920's to the 1960's.
Idaho: The Gooding County Historical Society has a page with downloadable Excel files with obituary indices for Gooding County from 1946–1947 and 1980–2011.
Illinois: Illinois Wesleyan University has digitized student publications ranging from 1870 to the present. The Illinois Digital Archives has added the Huntley Farmside for 1960–2000 and two collections relating to World War II: The Herald (for Melrose Park and area) for 1941–1945, and clippings and index cards relating to servicemen from Park Ridge.
Indiana: The Tell City–Perry County Public Library has an obituary index for 2010–2014. The Torch, the Valparaiso University student newspaper, has been digitized for 1914–1992.
Iowa: Granville and Newspaper Archive have worked together to place four Granville newspapers and a scrapbook collection online.
Louisiana: Centenary College of Louisiana, in Shreveport, has four student publications online covering 1899 to the present, including one published in French.
Massachusetts: If you had whalers in your family, you'll want to look at this. The Whalemen's Shipping List and Merchants' Transcript for 1843–1914, published in New Bedford, is online courtesy of the National Maritime Digital Library.
Montana: The Columbia Falls Columbian for 1891–1925 (I believe it is the complete run) has been digitized by Veridian.
New Jersey: A scattering of issues of the Newark Sunday Call from 1871–1881 and 1881–1946 are available in two separate collections from Google News Archive.
Ohio: The Cleveland Jewish News Digital Archive has added a few more historical Cleveland Jewish newspapers to its database. The Cleveland Public Library has two indices on its site for several Cleveland newspapers, one for death notices and one for general news items. Ohio Memory, the state digitization project, has added several newspapers to its collection.
Tennessee: This one's a little different. The Knox County Public Library has digitized and posted two years of the Knoxville News-Sentinel as a sample to motivate people to donate to a fundraiser to raise enough money for NewsBank to digitize the newspaper for the years 1922–1990. The two years available are 1940 and 1982 (no idea how those years were chosen). What I'm particularly curious about is whether the newspaper is planned to be available as a NewsBank subscription, since the library is raising the funds.
Texas: Some death notices and news items were transcribed from two Arlington newspapers and put together as books, which have now been scanned and can be downloaded from the Arlington Public Library Web site. The Dallas Voice, an LGBT newspaper, has been scanned for 1964 to the present and is available through the Portal to Texas History. And Lamar University student publications from 1933 to the present have been digitized and are on the university library site.
United States (national): Obituary Central is an index to obituaries from throughout the country. Warning: When you first go to the page you get an annoying pop-up ad.
It's interesting how digital partnerships work (or don't). The Poughkeepsie Journal is online again, on its third host site. I first found the historical Journal on Ancestry.com. Then the license apparently expired, and it was not available for a couple of years. Next it appeared on Footnote.com. When Ancestry bought Footnote's parent company, it was unable to work out a license with ProQuest, which had created the digital archive of the newspaper. The digital Journal has been offline for several years, collecting virtual dust on a virtual back shelf somewhere at ProQuest, and even the Journal didn't have access to it. But now Ancestry.com and Gannett, the Journal's owner, have redigitized the newspaper, through to the present, and it's on Newspapers.com. You can read a little more about the current situation at Dick Eastman's blog.
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