Tombstone Tuesday: Seen in Southern Illinois

My wife and I explored Southern Illinois this weekend - stopping at several of the hiking paths and other sites along the Shawnee Hills Wine Trail. In the Alto Pass area, we spotted the below tombstone.

We had to stop to take a picture, but we didn't ask directions.

If anyone is interested in a similar exploration, I can recommend a bed and breakfast to spend the night. The accomodations at Von Jakob are very comfortable, the food is excellent, and they have a nice selection of wine, beer, and mead to taste.

Amanuensis Monday: Prosperity and Name Changes

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them. If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post in the comments.

This post concludes the transcription of a tape my grandfather, Martin Deutsch, his older brother, Ted, and their sister, Berta (Deutsch) Freed recorded in 1977. I'm 2 hours and ten minutes into the tape, and at this point they're recalling odd jobs they had in their youth in Chicago.

Amanuensis Monday: Return to the Race Riot on July 2, 1917

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue my project to transcribe family letters, journals, audiotapes, and other historical artifacts. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin - some I never met - others I see a time in their life before I knew them.

Back in April I blogged about the Race Riot in East St. Louis on July 2, 1917. It may be the deadliest in the nation's history. According to sources I've read, the riot occurred on Collinsville Avenue between Broadway and Illinois Avenue. In April, I noted that my great grandmother had two brothers who lived in the area. I wondered:

So where were my great grandmother's brothers during the riot? I don't know. Only a generation removed from European pogroms, it's hard to believe they did anything truly regretful. There are no family stories I have heard, and their names aren't mentioned in any of the online sources I searched.

I didn't expect to find out the answer. But for one of the brothers, I did, in the St. Louis Post Dispatch 1874-1922 archives. He's actually mentioned in some of the sources I read back in April. Just not by name.

---

St. Louis Post Dispatch, October 19, 1917, page 2.

STATE ATTACKS ALIBI OF RACE RIOT CASE DEFENDANT
Draws From Henry Robinson Denial of Statements Made at Coroner’s Request

Harry Robinson’s alibi, in his trial with John Dow and Charles Hanna on the charge of murder in the East St. Louis race riot of July 2, was attacked by the prosecution in the Belleville circuit court today, by comparing it with the record of Robinson’s testimony at the coroner’s inquest.



The inquest testimony is not an official record, as the testimony was not taken verbatim by the stenographer, but was summarized. If Robinson had not taken the witness stand himself, the summarized record of his statement to the coroner could not have been placed before the jury.



His employer, Ben Cruvant, and Mrs. Cruvant, testified that Robinson was working in Cruvant’s shoe shop until noon July 2. This covered the time between 10 and 11 am., in which according to the State’s testimony, Robinson was holding up a pawnbroker and looting his shop of revolvers.



Robinson was asked, on cross-examination, if he had not said at the inquest that he was in front of the pawnshop when it was entered and that he saw the mob’s acts in the street during the morning. He made a general denial of his answers as summarized in the Coroner’s record.



Here are a few relevant quotes I've found from other sources:



"In the heat of the riot on Collinsville Avenue at about 1.15 o’clock p.m., July 2, 1917, while the mob were taking negroes from street cars and beating and shooting them a stray bullet, which had been fired at a negro boy, struck and killed a retired merchant, a white man named William Keyser."

Source: Biennial report and opinions of the Attorney General of the State of Illinois, 1918, p. 18.



“Harry Robinson, 21 year old shoe repairer, who was tried for the murder of William Keyser, a white man, but concerning whose guilt the jury was unable to agree, was taken to Chester yesterday to begin serving his five year sentence for conspiracy to which charge he pleaded guilty.”

Source: St. Louis Globe Democrat, October 31, 1917

---

The name of a relative can turn up in some of the unlikeliest of places. My great great uncle probably remained in his shoe shop throughout the afternoon, even if his employee left at noon. As long as it was true, his testifying on behalf of his employee can only be looked at positively, even if his employee turned out to be guilty of other crimes.



Mrs. Cruvant would have been Dora, née Goldstein, who Ben had married in 1912.

---

If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post below, or in the comments.

Amanuensis Monday: Affidavits of Support

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

Below I have transcribed the three Affidavits of Support I mentioned yesterday. They were issued in 1913 in support of the immigration of my great grandfather, Samuel Deutsch, and six children. Samuel also went by the name Salomon.

Since all three documents are the same, except for the blanks on the form that were filled in differently for each, I have transcribed them as one document utilizing color to distinguish the answers where they differed.

---

State of Illinois {
                  { S.S.
County of Cook    {

(Helen Deutsch/Adolf Rosenbloom/Samuel Goldberg) of the City of Chicago, County of Cook and State of Illinois, being first duly sworn on oath, deposes and says:

That he is the purchaser of (North German Lloyd) Prepaid #(34830) issued in favor of (Salomon Deutsch & Fam.) for (their) transportation from (Bremen) to Chicago, Ill.

Affiant further says that it is his intention and desire to have said passenger immigrant come to Chicago to live being well able of caring for (them) and that he hereby promises to willfully and voluntarily contribute all that may be necessary toward (their) care and support.

Affiant further says that he is a (Wife & Mother/Brother-in-law/Nephew) to above immigrant, and is a (Mid-Wife/Upholsterer/Presser) by occupation with a weekly income of ($10.00/$25.00/$20.00) and that his cash and other personal property amounts to ($300.00/$800.00/$3000.00). His present address is (2130 W. Division, Chicago Ill./1254 No Oakley Ave, Chicago Ill./2130 W. Division, Chicago, Ill.)

Affiant further says that he will and hereby assumes the trust and responsibility of said passenger immigrant and further guarantees to the Commissioner of Immigration of the United States that the aforesaid passenger will not become a public charge in the State of Illinois, or any other state of the United States.

Further affiant says not.
(signature)

Subscribed and sworn to before me a
Notary Public for Cook County, Illinois
This (2) day of (January) 1913
(signature)

---

The North German Lloyd Company operated out of Bremen, and as I have previously noted, the Deutsch family came over on the SS Rhein. I think the #34830 is an indication of a ticket number. If it were a price, it would likely be in German marks, which in 1913 would have converted to $8292.85. This seems a bit high, considering the personal property amounts on the three affidavits, which is why I believe it is a ticket number.

The addresses on West Division and North Oakley are fairly close to each other, both not too far from Humboldt Park. The third address on the image below is 1135 North Christiana Ave. Between January of 1913 when she signed the affidavit of support, and March, when her husband and children made the trip, Helen had moved there to join the family of Samuel's niece, Bertha (Deutsch) Newman, according to their passenger manifest.

---

If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post below, or in the comments.

OFallon, IL City Records

The Belleville News-Democrat reported on Monday that the city of O'Fallon, Illinois has put their city records online.

O'FALLON -- If you want to peruse the city's bills or check on the ordinance about O'Fallon's special election of 1936, now you can do it from the comfort of your own home.

As the culmination of what he called an eight-year project, City Clerk Phil Goodwin said any records someone might normally come down to City Hall to see are now available online.

"With the assistance of the city's Information Technology Department, access to public documents via our Web site is now a reality," Goodwin said. "I have been striving toward this goal since I ran for office in 2001."

To my knowledge, I don't have any kin who are current or past residents of the city. However, their new Public Documents section does contain information that might be of interest to Family Historians who do.

The Public Documents section is set up as a series of folders and subfolders like on your own computer.

Inside the City Clerk/Public/Cemetery Minutes Agenda/Cemetery Disposition Records subfolder there are a series of folders with years from 1963-2009 containing scans of the Authorizations family gave the city to bury the deceased in the OFallon City Cemetery. There's no index, but if you know the year someone died, you can browse through the entries for that year until you find your relative. The documents contain

• Name and age of Deceased
• Lot Number, Section, Grave number
• Name of Lot Owner
• Date of Funeral
• Signature of Authorizer, and if not lot owner, relationship to lot owner

These are the records of most obvious interest to the family historian. There's also a Property Records subfolder under City Clerk/Public. These records aren't organized neatly by year, but the filenames contain the address, so if you know where a family member lived you might find something of interest.

I haven't looked through all the documents, so there might be some other items of interest. There's definitely a lot there for those interested in the local government process, and history of the city.

St. Louis Post Dispatch Obituaries - and other area newspapers

CURRENT INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND HERE


One of the problems with the blog-format is that one finds oneself rewriting old posts with updated information. The old posts remain with the outdated, sometimes inaccurate information.

For example, I have written several times about researching obituaries in St. Louis, particularly for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. I'm going to do it again, and I'm now going to add a link at the top of all my old posts to this entry, so that anyone who finds those old pages doesn't leave the site with outdated information.

And if I write another post in the future, I will add a link at the top of this entry, and update the links in the prior entries.

The St. Louis Public Library Obituary Search

The St. Louis Public Library has created a searchable index for St. Louis Post Dispatch obituaries covering the years: 1880-1930, 1942-1945, 1960-1964, and 1992-2008. (I suspect they will continue to update the index as time goes by.)

Two examples:

1) A great-grandfather's entry:

Feinstein, Herman M. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1963 11/8 p1B, Article 11/9 p5A

His classified obituary appeared on November 8th, 1963 on page 1B. An article appeared on November 9th, on page 5A.

2) The entry for one of Herman's brothers, who died as an infant

Feinstein, David St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1896 Burial permit 3/18

The burial permit appeared March 18th, 1896. The page number isn't indexed in this case, but we still have the date of the newspaper. The burial permit listings contained significantly less information than an obituary. Usually just a name, date and address. I know that David was definitely Herman's brother, though, because the address matches the address in the city directories for the family.

In addition to the search engine, they have an index-by-year that can be browsed, leading to the same entries.

St. Louis Post Dispatch - 1975-1977

An index for these years can be found on Bob Doerr's website. He has been the editor of the Missouri State Genealogical Association Journal since 1992.

St. Louis Post Dispatch Archives 1988-Current

The Post Dispatch website allows you to search obituaries back to 1988, and then it gives you the option of downloading the obituaries directly from the site for $2.95. This searches every word, so you can find entries that mention surnames of children, etc. However, the search engine will not capture every obituary, so it is useful to check the indexes above for those after 1992.

St. Louis Argus Obituaries

"The ST. LOUIS ARGUS serves as a valuable resource for deaths in the local African-American community, especially during the early 20th century, when obituaries or death notices for this segment of the population were generally not carried in major area newspapers."

On an old version of the St. Louis Public Library website they have obituaries from the St. Louis Argus (1915-1919, 1921-1927, 1942-1945)

I suspect over time these will be moved to the same obituary search engine as the Post Dispatch obituaries.

The Westliche Post Obituaries

The St. Louis County Library has an index for The Westliche Post, a German language newspaper

The index currently covers the years 1880-1887, with the indexes for 1881 and 1882 only covering 6 months each.

On the other side of the Mississippi river

Belleville, Illinois Daily Advocate

An index for vital statistics (Adoptions, Births, Baptisms, Marriages, Divorces, Deaths) 1927-1954 at the St. Clair Genealogical Society.

The St. Clair Genealogical Society also has indexes for the Belleville News Democrat (1994-2007), Freeburg Tribune (1904-1939), Lebanon Advertiser (1917-1921), and the Millstadt Enterprise (1897-1949). Scroll down their homepage for links to each of them. There is a site-search box at the bottom of the page, though it doesn't include the Daily Advocate index.

How to Get a Copy of the Obituary

If you do live in St. Louis, you can find the obituary in the newspaper microfilm archives at either the St. Louis County or St. Louis City headquarter libraries. (Only the County library has The Westliche Post on microfilm. Both have the St. Louis Argus, but the County library doesn't appear to have the years 1942-1945.)

You can also request the County library or City library photocopy and mail it to you. The fee is minimal at both places.

For the Illinois newspapers, the Belleville Public Library is the place to go.

Poetry: The Mounds of Cahokia - Micah P Flint

Last Friday I posted the classic poem by Longfellow, The Jewish Cemetery at Newport. I commented that Longfellow's concern for a 'dead race' amused me. Here's a poem by someone not nearly as well-known as Longfellow. He, too, visiting a burial site, remarks on what he considers a dead race.

The Mounds of Cahokia
by Micah P. Flint (1807-1830)

The sun's last rays were falling from the West,
The deepening shades stole slowly o'er the plain,
The evening breeze had lulled itself to rest:
And all was silent, save the mournful strain
With which the widowed turtle wooed in vain
Her absent lover to her lonely nest.

Now, one by one, emerging to the sight,
The brighter stars assumed their seats on high,
The moon's pale crescent glowed serenely bright,
As the last twilight fled along the sky,
And all her train in cloudless majesty
Were glittering on the dark, blue vault of night.

I lingered, by some soft enchantment bound,
And gazed, enraptured, on the lovely scene.
From the dark summit of an Indian mound
I saw the plain, outspread in softened green,
Its fringe of hoary cliffs, by moonlight sheen,
And the dark line of forest, sweeping round.

I saw the lesser mounds which round me rose,
Each was a giant mass of slumbering clay.
There slept the warriors, women, friends and foes.
There, side by side, the rival chieftains lay;
And mighty tribes, swept from the face of day,
Forgot their wars, and found a long repose.

Ye mouldering relics of departed years!
Your names have perished; not a trace remains,
Save, where the grass-grown mound its summit rears
From the green bosom of your native plains.
Say! Do your spirits wear oblivion's chains?
Did death forever quench your hopes and fears?

Or live they, shrined in some congenial form?
What if the swan, who leaves her summer nest
Among the northern lakes, and mounts the storm,
To wing her rapid flight to climes more blest,
Should hover o'er the very spot where rest
The crumbling bones once with her spirit warm.

What if the song, so soft, so sweet, so clear,
Whose music fell so gently from on high,
In tones aerial, thrilling my rapt ear;
Though not a speck was on the cloudless sky,
Were their own soft funereal melody,
While lingering o'er the scenes that once were dear?

Or did those fairy hopes of future bliss,
Which simple Nature to your bosoms gave
Find other worlds with fairer skies than this,
Beyond the gloomy portals of the grave,
In whose bright bowers the virtuous and the brave
Rest from their toils, and all their cares dismiss?

Where the great hunter still pursues the chase,
And o'er the sunny mountains tracks the deer,
Or finds again each long-extinguished race,
And sees once more the mighty mammoth rear
The giant form which lies embedded here,
Of other years the sole remaining trace.

Or it may be that still ye linger near
The sleeping ashes, once your dearest pride;
And, could your forms to mortal eye appear,
Could the dark veil of death be thrown aside,
Then might I see your restless shadows glide,
With watchful care, around these relics dear.

If so, forgive the rude, unhallowed feet,
Which trode so thoughtless o'er your mighty dead.
I would not thus profane their low retreat,
Nor trample where the sleeping warrior's head
Lay pillowed on its everlasting bed,
Age after age, still sunk in slumbers sweet.

Farewell; and may you still in peace repost.
Still o'er you may the flowers, untrodden, bloom,
And gently wave to every wind that blows,
Breathing their fragrance o'er each lonely tomb,
Where, earthward mouldering, in the same dark womb,
Ye mingle with the dust, from whence ye rose.

MICAH P. FLINT, son of Timothy Flint, who rendered eminent service in the cultivation and encouragement of literature in the Mississippi valley, was born in Lurenberg, Massachusetts, about the year 1807. While Micah was yet a boy, his father selected the west as a field for missionary labor, and the young poet received his education, with his father for tutor, at St. Louis, New Madrid, New Orleans, and Alexandria, Mississippi, to which places Rev. Mr. Flint's engagements as a missionary successively called him. When failing health finally required his father to suspend his labors as a minister, Micah studied law and was admitted to the bar at Alexandria, but was not permitted to become known as a lawyer. His first published poem was on a mound that stood near a farm-house in Cahokia prairie, Illinois, to which for a few months, when his health required a respite from severe labors, his father took the family. -- William Turner Coggeshall, The Poets and Poetry of the West: With Biographical and Critical Notices 55-56 (Columbus, Ohio: Follett, Foster and Company, 1860)

'Not permitted to become known as a lawyer' is a 19th century euphemism. Micah died at age 23. He had one collection of poetry: The Hunter and Other Poems.

The Cahokia Mounds are immediately across the Mississippi river from St. Louis, Missouri. Mounds were built on both sides of the river, and a recent article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch talked of efforts to preserve Sugar Loaf Mound. The Osage tribe believes the mounds were built by their ancestors.

July 2, 1917 - East St. Louis

The theme for the 71st Carnival of Genealogy is: Local History

As genealogists, we are used to tracing our ancestors and the history of the places they lived. Not all of us live where our ancestors did. Do we take the time to see the history all around us? Use some of your investigative skills to research the
house, street, or town/city where YOU live. Write about an interesting person, place, or event of local history.

I do live where my ancestors lived - or at least moved to between the 1880s-1920s. I have talked before about St. Louis History. Most notably about:

• Housing Conditions in 1908 (First Entry) ( Second Entry)
• The St. Louis Snow Event of 1982
• Missouri Cider and TS Eliot
  

I considered writing about a positive, uplifting moment in our city's history, but then I recalled running across information a year or so ago about a race riot, in the same neighborhood some family lived at the time. Technically, it didn't occur in the same city I live. A river and a state boundary separates the two. Some may accuse me of violating the purpose of this carnival's theme. But the term 'local' is more encompassing than city. Measuring from the office building in which I work, the place the riots occurred is 8 miles closer than the home in which I live.

July 2, 1917, one of the largest race riots in United States history occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois. Estimates on deaths range from 48-150 people killed, making it the bloodiest until the LA riots in 1992 may have surpassed it. Though since less than 60 died in LA, the record may still stand.

The police chief estimated that 100 blacks had been killed. The renowned journalist Ida B. Wells reported in The Chicago Defender that 40-150 black people were killed during July in the rioting in East St. Louis. Six thousand blacks were left homeless after their neighborhood was burned. [Wikipedia]

Here is a contemporary account:

On the first of July, 1917, between 9 o'clock and midnight, two automobiles loaded with white men drove through the negro settlement of East St. Louis shooting toward negro homes. This naturally aroused the colored people so that by midnight great numbers of negroes were marching the streets in the colored settlement portion of East St. Louis armed with shotguns, rifles and revolvers. The police department having been informed of these conditions ordered a sergeant of police, two patrolmen and a chauffeur to proceed at once in an automobile to the south part of East St. Louis, the seat of the trouble. Upon reaching Fifteenth Street and Bond Avenue, this detail of police encountered about one hundred negroes marching in the street in battle array. After some conversation between the police and the negroes, the negro mob fired into the automobile, killing the sergeant of police and one patrolman. 'This occurred about 12.15 a. m. of the second of July, 1917.

From 8 o'clock a. m. to 10 o'clock a. m. on July 2, 1917, the automobile that had been occupied by the policemen and which was riddled with bullets was standing in front of the police station at East St. Louis, around which automobile crowds of people had gathered. Some of the leaders called on these people generally to go to a certain hall to discuss the situation. At this meeting incendiary speeches were made and when the crowd left the hall, it marched down Collinsville Avenue, the principal business street of East St. Louis. Assaults on colored people by this crowd began to be made about 10 o'clock a. m. and continued until 11 p. m. of July 2, developing into the most lawless and disgraceful race riot. About 8 o'clock in the evening of that day the white mob began applying the torch, burning large areas of houses occupied by colored people. In this riot, eleven white men and probably one hundred colored people lost their lives. Many of the bodies were completely burned, some were thrown in the Cahokia Creek, and the exact number of those killed will never be known.

During all of this time, there was not the slightest effort made on the part of the police force of East St. Louis nor the sheriffs force of St. Clair County to stop the riot.

Biennial report and opinions of the Attorney General of the State of Illinois By Illinois. Attorney General's Office, Illinois, Published by State Printers, 1918 (pp 16-18)

The area is better defined in a 1982 account:

Between ten o’clock and eleven o’clock, other colored people were attacked along Collinsville Avenue between Broadway and Illinois Avenue. This area became a bloody half-mile in the following three or four hours. (Race riot at East St. Louis, July 2, 1917, by Elliott M. Rudwick, 1982, p. 44)

There were a handful of bright spots

Many Negroes owed their lives to the alarm sent by True Light Baptist Church which rang its bell to indicate that rampaging whites were coming. Sympathetic whites hid Negroes in their basements while flames illuminated the night sky. Hundreds of refugees were brought to the city hall auditorium.(The East St. louis Action Research Project)

But

A few whites who attempted to protest against the violence were threatened; some were ‘hissed’ and ‘hushed’ by women carrying hatpins and pen knives as weapons. (Rudwick, p. 44)

And several others, though sympathetic, were too scared to act.

(Left: Political cartoon. Caption: Mr. President, why not make America safe for Democracy?")

Some of my ancestors moved between East and West a lot; especially the Cruvant branch. As I noted above, then, as today, if you worked in downtown St. Louis, Missouri, living in the Illinois suburbs could actually be more convenient.

My second great grandfather, Moshe Leyb Cruvant, lived at 415 Collinsville Avenue up until his death in 1911. My great grandmother, Bertha Cruvant, likely lived there until she married a month before her father died. I believe his son, David Cruvant, was already living there, or moved into the house at that point. He was definitely living there in 1918, when he registered for the war. The Sanborn maps I looked at date back to 1905 when Collinsville Avenue extended only to the 350s - right on the border of Illinois Avenue. It appears the numbering hasn't changed - on current maps, 415 is just North of Illinois Avenue, just outside the boundaries of the riot defined by Rudwick. Another son, Ben, was also living in East St. Louis, not too far away.

So where were my great grandmother's brothers during the riot? I don't know. Only a generation removed from European pogroms, it's hard to believe they did anything truly regretful. There are no family stories I have heard, and their names aren't mentioned in any of the online sources I searched.

Where in the World was Clifford Cruvant

I mentioned a few weeks ago my issue with the birth record of Clifford Cruvant in Cook County (Chicago) Illinois. The name in the index differed from the report. Cynthia at ChicagoGenealogy looked up the Certificate of Correction on the Family History Library microfilm, and posted a copy for me. It reappears below.

As is so often the case, the mystery deepens. The Family History Library microfilm didn’t capture the date on the correction so I decided to look up the name of the County Clerk at the top of the form. Michael J Flynn was Cook County Clerk from 1934-1950. Some say he was the origin of the phrase “in like Flynn.” Others suggest other politicians named Flynn, and still others suggest the actor Errol Flynn. Regardless, Michael J Flynn wasn’t a County Clerk who time forgot, and his dates in office are pretty well established.

Clifford was born in 1904, so he was at least thirty when his birth certificate was corrected. More importantly, since his mother signed the correction, both his mother and he were somewhere in 1920 and 1930. And his mother signed the correction with the surname Cruvant, suggesting she may not have remarried. My prior assumption had been the reason we couldn't find them was that she likely remarried and Clifford’s surname got changed, though that now appears not to be the case.

The Cruvant surname has many legitimate and illegitimate spellings. Since the English spelling is basically a transliteration of the Hebrew transliteration of the Lithuanian town Kruvandai, anything phonetically close is ‘accurate’ and several different family branches adopted different spellings. Cruvant, Cruvand, Kruvant, Kruvand, and Kroovand are the five most common spellings. And then there are the creative ways it has been written by clerks and census takers, or misinterpreted by indexers, for example, Crouvant, Cruivant, and even once Casavant. (Can't blame the indexer, either, as the handwriting was that bad.)

But Ancestry allows you to search by first name only, and I've gone through every person in the Illinois Census for 1920 and 1930 whose first name began with 'Clif' and who was born in 1904+- 2 years. Without any likely matches. I could drop the age from the search, or expand the range a bit, but the list was already getting pretty long. The list for 'Paul' is longer. Though I have tried to find Goldie in the same fashion. It's possible they were no longer in Illinois.

The next step was City Directories. I found a few Chicago City Directories on Footnote. They were definitely there in 1911, though they don't appear in the 1916 or 1923 directory. I found a Chicago Tribune news story mentioning Goldie, and providing her address, from 1912.

The St. Louis County Library has Chicago Directories from 1913-1917, 1923, and 1928. I already knew 1923 would be a bust, so that left 6 years for me to research. I dropped by the library, and the research added an address for 1914, but that was the last sight of them in Chicago.

I returned to Ancestry and did a search in the entire 1920 census for anyone born in 1904+-10 years with a first name beginning with 'Clif', and who had a mother whose name began with 'Gold'. And then I changed the mother field for names starting with 'Lil' for her middle name, Lillian. There were only 1000 names for me to page through with the latter. I was looking for a particular misspelled surname which helped. Unfortunately, I didn't find them.

My most recent effort was based on a suspicion Clifford may have been in the process of changing his name when the correction to his birth certificate was filed. I had a birthdate, and anyone born in 1904 who lived past the 1950s is likely to be in the SSDI. Rootsweb's database allows you to search by first name and birthdate, which I did. There are only 6 Cliffords in the database who share Clifford Cruvant's birthday. I asked myself, how many of these six can I find in the 1910 census? Because if they're there, they're not Clifford Cruvant. Unfortunately, all of them have matches in the 1910 census of approximately the correct age. The matches may not be them, but they could be.

So I am no further, and as of this moment I am unsure what happened to Goldie and Clifford after 1914. Ancestry is working on a 1940 census substitute, which could end up being helpful in solving the mystery, but isn't yet.

What was the indexer looking at?

FamilySearch has been indexing their images for the Cook County Birth Reports (1878-1922) (Currently input through 1915)

Below is the Birth Report for an "Edward Cruvant" son of Ben Cruvant and Lillian White. Ben was my great grandmother's brother. Approximately 1903 Ben and his father Morris traveled to Chicago, perhaps exploring the possibility of moving the family there. Ben and Lillian were married in May of 1904. Edward was born two months later. A sister, Sarah, was born in July of 1905. East St. Louis City Directories indicate they'd moved back to St. Louis by 1907. By 1910 Lillian and her two kids had returned to Chicago, and Ben remained in St. Louis, remarrying in 1912. The existence of a first wife and children wasn't hid from his second family, but no one knew what had happened to them.

In the 1910 census Lillian's son was indexed as Clifford E.

What's really strange, is that on FamilySearch, he is indexed as "Clifford Paul." The name Clifford appears nowhere on the Report. Nowhere at all. The image clearly says, 'Edward.' Please feel free to look at the image below and verify this for me, but the name couldn't be clearer. If I didn't know about the 1910 census I would scratch my head and really question the eyesight of the poor indexer, or maybe think there was some database error where the given name from one certificate got indexed with the surname from another . Because of the 1910 census, I know the odds are good this wasn't a mistake. My assumption is that the indexer had another document in addition to the Birth Report. A document they haven't scanned in. I want to know what that document is, what other information I might expect to find on it, and where I can get a copy of it.



Update: Cynthia at ChicagoGenealogy not only tells me what the document was (a Certificate of Correction) she finds it on the Family History Library microfilm and scans it in for me. Thanks!

The FHL copy doesn't include the date of the correction, but the County Clerk at the time of the correction was the 'infamous' Michael J Flynn, who was County Clerk from 1934-1950, so the correction was at least 30 years afterwards.

American Bottom and Illinois Harvest

In March I mentioned the American Bottom Riverweb site, which

contains a large digital archive of artifacts related to the American Bottom region, defined as the area south of the confluence of the Missouri, Mississippi and Illinois rivers. This includes portions of St. Clair, Randolph, Madison, and Monroe Counties in Illinois. Most of the information on the site appears to be centered on the Cahokia Mounds, and East St. Louis.

The site has moved to a new location on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's servers, and while they still have an interesting archive, it appears they have removed the East St. Louis City Directories.

Never fear, Illinois Harvest, a product of the UIUC library, has them.

Illinois Harvest has a large digital book collection for download, including over 400 entries under the subject header of County and Local Histories, another 400 under Church and Congregational History in Illinois, and 125 under Genealogy Resources.

The latter includes the 1813 and 1818 Pension lists, listing everyone in the US receiving a military pension in the given year. As well as a couple dozen Chicago "Blue Books" and social registers.