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The Middletown Historical Society undertook a progressive 21^st century project in 2012, one that is of tremendous value to researchers.   The nonprofit focused on interpreting the history of the major New Castle County town south of the canal has digitized the Middletown Transcript.  This paper has always covered its beat thoroughly, cranking out local content about Odessa, Townsend, Port Penn, Delaware City, and Middletown every week since 1868 as it continues publishing in the local community.   When you read the pages of this weekly, you’re reading hometown news.

The Society contracted with a professional electronic imaging firm and now members are able to view the original products digitally.  They are also able to search the issues from 1868 to the top of the 1990s.  This digital creation which is  text searchable is an outstanding contribution to the study of local history.  Newspaper research, once a time-consuming, hit or miss undertaking has quickly moved from the old crank the microfilm process to the point where our  papers are viewable and searchable in full text.

Most major newspapers have been digitized to some degree, but at the local level in Delaware these efforts are just getting underway.  There are, of course, some exceptions in that some of the national subscription content providers have created images of a few of the early Delaware papers, but not much has been done beyond those early years.

Thanks Middletown Historical Society for being a trailblazer with local hometown papers in Delaware and for aiding researchers and genealogist.   This is very progressive work.

 

Thanks, everyone for liking Delmarva History on FB.  As winter draws to a close, we hit 2,000 likes on this Friday in the middle of March.   It was in the midst of our snowy season, February 4, 2015, when we passed another important milestone, 1,500 likes.

We appreciate your engagement and support as the page shares curated and original heritage-related content about the culture and history of the Delmarva Peninsula and the land around the Delaware and Chesapeake.  As you make this a lively place by commenting and sharing other materials, it makes the effort worthwhile since we all learn through collaboration.

As heritage organizations, informal groups, and individuals embraced Facebook as a public commons, we all have had a platform that allows everyone to share our joy and appreciation for the past, whether it’s a local area or a special topic.  Just look around Delmarva, as an example, for there are so many fine pages creating broader contact for the stories and materials from the past.  (notice the other pages that share their posts with us.)

We all come at this in various ways, levels of involvement and purpose.  For formal groups it’s an efficient way to further the organization’s outreach mission of informing, educating, and promoting the stories of a community, which engage new, broader audiences.  Others create informal communities sharing their interest in covered bridges, railroads, waterways, organizations, and much more.

We’ll keep posting original and curated pieces from the region, and thanks for following the page.  It’s been amazing to see the quick growth as we networked with older, more established formal and informal sites, while also adding our original content, photos, articles, and brief updates.

When we launched Delmarva History on October 24, 2014, we weren’t sure about this platform. But we’d often thought about the best way to share our personal collections and interests. This pubic commons provided the answer as it reaches such a broad audience, is so easy to use, and there is virtually no learning curve.

In the 19^th century, a variety of directories were published.  These include mercantile serials, city directories, state gazetteers, newspaper directories, and volumes for the professions, such as doctors and lawyers.  These publications are valuable sources when doing local and family history research.

Fortunately for researchers many of the older volumes are available from online, as library holdings are limited and scattered, except at some of the largest special collections institutions.

Here are links to two volumes I was working with today.

The Thomson’s Mercantile and Professional Directory 1851-52 was a specialty publication, designed to help merchants reach a wider customer base.  It informed a person where they might “obtain the goods he wants to the best advantage.”    This is a quality scan of a volume in the University of Virginia Library.

The other was the Delaware State Directory and Gazetteer for 1874-75, compiled by Wm. H. Boyd Directory Publisher.  The Gazetteer contains descriptions of most towns, villages, and hundreds in the State, while also providing a list of the professions, trades, and occupations in that town, along with the farmers and fruit growers.  This is a quality scan from the New York State Library.

The Enoch Pratt Free Library has many excellent resources for those digging into state, local, and family history.  Those materials include microfilm reels containing practically every extant newspaper in Maryland, including all the county weeklies.  In the serials department, you will also find the Evening Sun and the Baltimore News American, papers which are often overlooked by genealogists and others as they tend to rely on the Baltimore Sun.

The Maryland Department is another strength.  This unit has been collecting and organizing books and other types of materials on every subject since 1935. as long as the information is about Maryland   It has over 50,000 volumes pertaining to the State, 300,000 items on over 7,000 subjects in vertical files, and lots of photographs, maps and atlases.  Items I often use in this reading room are the telephone directories.  The stacks contain volumes for  rural counties going back to the 1920s.

And for a perhaps over a decade, I have been using the great databases, which are accessible from the convenience of your home. The Baltimore Sun Historical Archives (1835 to 1987), for example, is available online and is text searchable.  Other online publications include the Washington Post (1877 – 1994), the New York Times (1851 – 2007), the Baltimore Afro-American (1893 – 1988), and the Wall Street Journal.

The institution also has a number of general magazine and scholarly databases available for patrons.  One of those is JSTOR, the virtual repository for scholarly journals, including many of the state historical society journals from around the nation.  Another, which those studying or communities will find valuable, is the Sanborn Map database for communities all around the State.  You may find many these to be of assistance.

The Pratt’s electronic holdings are strong and continue to grow.  To access these valuable text searchable resources, you need a Baltimore City Library Card.  All Maryland residents are eligible, but you do have to visit any branch in the city to receive the card.

These are resources I use all the time, as they help me find evidence beyond what the local papers provide.  I also use them to locate reference dates, which allows me to access the local non-indexed materials without spending countless hours on a search.

You will find these Enoch Pratt databases to be of great assistance when doing genealogical research.