Analog to Digital

Do you remember genealogy research before the days of the Internet and digital images? As I’m going thru my (old) sources for John Minnick, I encountered a couple of citations to some of those ‘old’ sources. These ‘old’ sources are either handwritten notes or photocopies from books. Yes, we used to use books!

As I was reviewing my old citations, I found both transcriptions and photocopies. The transcription is notes taken from LDS microfilm #1435942.

The photocopy is from the book, Marriage Records Henry County, IL Book B 5 Jan 1869 through 5 May 1878.

Since these Henry County Illinois marriage records have been digitized and made available on the FamilySearch site, I can not only recheck the index but also locate the marriage records.

When I recorded my old handwritten notes, I recorded a volume number and a page number for each license. In reality, the page number is NOT given. Instead the index has the license number. As I located each of these marriage records, I discovered that these license numbers start over for each year. Thus, I could browse thru Volume B on film 1435944 to locate the year and then the license number.

Following this process, I was able to locate the marriage license for John Minnick and his second wife, Phebe Tripp.

Working my way thru these records, I was able to locate licenses for Wilson J., Emliline and Barbara E Minnick, children of John and Elizabeth Minnick. In addition, I located marriage records for some of the children of John’s brother, Peter. One of those records helped me to clarify a name for one of Peter’s sons since the record identified the parents.

In 1885, a Gilbert A Minnick married Susan E Patterson in Henry County, Illinois. The marriage record identifies Gilbert’s parents as Peter Minnick and Mary A Geyer.

While I could have just accepted my old ‘analog’ records, going thru the efforts to locate the ‘digital’ images not only helped me improve my sourcing but it helped me verify a relationship that I had previously questioned.