Hoosier Daddy?

With retail-minded timing, on December 7 Ancestry.com (the Microsoft of online genealogy) released a marketing research study done for them in February. Neither the methodology nor the margins of error appear to be disclosed, so it's as dubious as a family history without footnotes. Still, some of the results are curious enough to nod to:

* Anyone who's spent time on the third floor of the Newberry knows that the age structure of active family history researchers skews way old, but supposedly among the general public, interest in knowing more about family history actually drops from 83 percent among 18-to-34-year-olds to 73 percent among the 55+ crowd.

* If you know the name of more than one of your eight great-grandparents, you're in the minority -- so all ages have a good deal to learn.

* New England, not the South, is the heartland of genealogy. (This difference is credible only because it squares with the publishing history in the two regions; the small differences reported could easily be wiped out by small sample size.) "Southerners know the least about their roots. Only 38 percent know both of their grandmothers’ maiden names, compared with 50 percent of Northeasterners. Also, only 47 percent of Southerners know what both of their grandfathers do or did for a living, while 55 percent of Northeasterners know both grandfathers’ occupations."

ChicagoAncestors.org

The Internet Scout Report has discovered the Newberry Library's intriguing map-based site ChicagoAncestors.org:

First-time visitors to the site can just go ahead and type in a street
address or browse through the online collections which are culled from a
variety of local institutions. In the "Tools" area, visitors will find
address conversion tools [from the Chicago History Museum],
Chicago City Directory street guides, and a tutorial on researching
Chicago in the period before the fire of 1871. Visitors also have the
opportunity to add content information to this interactive resource
[actually, free registration is required to do this], which it should
be noted is open source.

Genealogists have in the past been known to collect birth, marriage, and death dates without paying enough attention to where these things happened. This geography-centric site is a wonderful antidote. Chicago researchers in particular will appreciate the scanned-in street guides from 1866, 1870, 1875, 1880, 1885, 1892, 1900, 1910, and 1923, and the ability to convert pre-1909 street numbers to today's system. (Of course, at the physical Newberry you can view microfilms of full city directories from these years and many more. Hmm, the family of my wife's first cousin three times removed lived at 346 West Walnut just off Western for a few years in the 1870s; now I know that that became 2344 West Walnut in 1909. I haven't been to check what's there now; let's see, Metrobot's not much help this time, but on the Center for Neighborhood Technology's City News Chicago site it looks like a big two-story building of 1948 vintage covers that address and several more...)

Oh. Sorry. You still here? I was going to say that while ChicagoAncestors has allowed registrants to submit new material since November 2, I couldn't find the help section that would tell you how.