Finding Records Online – Indiana

I took a few days off for the Christmas holiday, but now I am back again. We had wonderful weather here even though it was quite warm. It was in the upper 70s to low 80s everyday. It was perfect weather to do yard work and wash the car. Looking out my window right now I have chickadees, warblers and tufted titmice sitting at my bird feeder. 

Today’s blog will be back on my topic of state records. Indiana has a wealth of records online. Many of these records are available through the Indiana State Library. These databases can be found on the Indiana Memory Project website at http://www.in.gov/library. There is a Genealogy section under the Collections site. The Genealogy Collection includes several useful online databases such as Indiana Marriages Database pre-1850, Indiana Marriages Database 1993-2002, Indiana World War II Servicemen, Indianapolis Newspaper Index 1848-1991, Logansport Newspaper Index 1848-1855, Marion County Death Index 1925-1945, New Albany Newspaper Index 1849-1889, Vincennes Newspaper Index 1804-1827, and the Vital Information Exchange Database.  

In addition to the Indiana State Library databases, there are many that focus on specific counties or events. Some of the site I have found include: 

• Court Records (Clinton County) - http://genealogy.fcpl.accs.net/
• Hoosier Heritage Digital Library - http://www.hoosierheritage.net/
• County Histories (Fulton County) – includes marriages, deaths, and other records - http://www.fulco.lib.in.us/genealogy/fulcogenealogyfrontpage.htm
• Obituaries (Dekalb County) - http://obit.gpl.lib.in.us/
• Obituary Index (Elkhart County, Elkhart Truth) (1921-1937 & 1975) - http://www.elkhart.lib.in.us/cgi-bin/index5.pl?&file=obit_db.html
• Obituary Index (Clinton County) - http://www.accs.net/fcpl/obit.htm
• Obituary Index (Madison County) - http://www.alex.lib.in.us/obits2002/
• Obituary Index (Madison County) - http://historical.elwood.lib.in.us/obituaries.asp
• Obituary Index (Madison County, Anderson Daily Bulletin) (1921-1967) - http://www.and.lib.in.us/cemetery/obituary.shtml
• Obituaries (Marshall County, The Bremen Enquirer) (1884-1967) - http://www.bremen.lib.in.us/historical/bpl_obituaries.asp
• Obituary Index (Michigan City, LaPorte County) - http://www.mclib.org/obituary.htm
• Obituary Index (St. Joseph County) (1913-2005) - http://www.sjcpl.org/obits/search_form.php
• Obituary Collection (Vanderburgh County) - http://browning.evpl.org/
• Cemetery Index (Madison County) - http://www.and.lib.in.us/cemetery/cemeterysearch.shtml
• Cemetery Index (Montgomery County) - http://history.cdpl.lib.in.us/montcocem.html
• Cemetery Index (Montgomery County, Masonic Cemetery) - http://history.cdpl.lib.in.us/masonic.html
• Naturalization Records Index (Madison County) (1890-1958) - http://www.and.lib.in.us/cemetery/naturalization.shtml
• Allen County Digital Collections - http://www.acpl.lib.in.us/database/index/acpl_digital_library.html
• Newspapers (Evansville Press) - http://local.evpl.org/
• Military Service Notes (St. Joseph County) WW II, Vietnam, Korea - http://www.sjcpl.org/servicenotes/index.php  

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

Well, it has been a few days since my last blog again. It is hard to keep up during the holidays, between the parties and shopping and everything. But tonight I am going to highlight a website being developed by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership with the Library of Congress. The Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website is currently in beta testing and can be found at http://www.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica/home.html. This site allows you to search a variety of newspapers published between 1880-1910. Additionally, you can read up on American newspapers printed since 1690.

Currently there are a limited number of newspapers which are searchable. In May 2005, the NDNP began its development phase by making awards to six state projects that were selecting newspapers published in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, and Virginia from the decades of 1880 to 1910. Since then thay have added newspapers from Washington DC, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Texas. These projects have digitized over 100,000 pages, according to the guidelines outlined by the Library of Congress. I decided to search for some of my Tervort relatives in the Utah newspapers. There is an interesting story of how this family ended up in Utah but I will not go into the details. For the search I chose Utah as the state and entered Tervort as the search term. I ended up with 12 results. These results included the marriage of Moroni Tervort and Rosa Hiatt from the Deseret Evening News; a listing of Frank and Henry Tervort as Republican delegates in the 1896 election from the Salt Lake Herald; and I found out that Moroni Tervort was selected in a lottery as one of 714 Utah citizens to fight in the War with Spain in 1898. He was one of the 4 men selected from Payson. All of these articles add just that much more context to my understanding of the life of my ancestors.

The second part of the database is the chronicling of American newspapers published since 1690. I found this database to be very interesting. I decided to do a search on my hometown newspaper, The Community Post of Minster, Ohio. What I found out was that the paper started out as a German paper called the Minster Volksfreund in 1894. It changed names to The Minster Post and continued as a German paper until 1918 but then changed to an English paper until 1964. After that, they again changed the name to The Community Post which is still being printed. I remember as a child visiting my grandmother and having her read the German articles from the old newspapers. I invite you to check out your local newspapers and learn more about the history of the papers in your area.

Newspapers from Oceania (Australia & New Zealand)

We have been having fun looking at old newspapers online lately. Newspapers are a good source for information as you research your genealogy. They can provide hints about important events during the person's lifetime, and details on mariages, births, deaths, etc. Everyone probably realizes that the US newspapers can be found in several subscription places such as Ancestry.com and GenealogyBank.com. But where would you go if, for some reason, your ancestors happened to immigrate to Australia or New Zealand? Several of my wife's lines, the Bielefeld, LeBoeuf and Vickery sides, happened to settle in Australia and travel to New Zealand during the latter part of the 19th century. The sites I have listed below are all free to use and do not require a subscription.

PapersPast is a product of the National Library of New Zealand. It can be found on the web at http://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/. PapersPast contains more than one million pages of digitised New Zealand newspapers and periodicals. The collection covers the years 1839 to 1920 and includes publications from all regions of New Zealand. The site is very user friendly and allows you to perform searches by key words, date, region or publication title. One of the things I love about this site is that the pages have been converted to OCR so you can copy the text as the computer interpreted it, directly into your text editing program or genealogy software. Of course the computer is never 100% correct in its interpretation so you will have to compare the OCR against the digital image.

If you have Maori ancestry you can view the Maori newspaper collection at http://nzdl.sadl.uleth.ca/. Look toward the bottom of the page to find the link to Nuipepa: Maori Newspapers. This site is written in Maori but does have English translations of the site however, the newspapers are all in the Maori language. It covers the Maori newspapers published during the period of 1842 to 1932

Australian Newspapers Online is a product of the National Library of Australia. This site is currently in beta and can be found at http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/. This site has digitised images of various newspapers from all regions of Australia during the period of 1803 to 1954. As in PapersPast, the Australian Newspapers Online compares the OCR text alongside the digitised image however this site has some very cool options that I had not seen before on other sites. First of all, you can correct the OCR text online for others to read. That means that any corrections you find will be permanently included in the online record. Additional options include the tagging of images and the ability to leave comments concerning the article.

These are all very user friendly sites and give us an idea of how online newspaper archives should perform. I know that Australia and New Zealand aren't always the hottest locations for genealogical research, but for those of us who have links to the land down under, these are great sites.

G'day mates!