Wednesday, July 9, 2008

A Possible Little-Known Record?

I happened to notice Harold's post about the Abrams Seminar at the Library of Michigan earlier today, and the mentioning township records made me think about a possible record source that genealogists could use. When I was interning at the Grand Rapids, Michigan city archives this past fall, I did some indexing of the early city minutes. I was mainly indexing the topics discussed at the meetings, but I did frequently index the names of petitioners who had presented petitions to the council as well. It maybe very possible that a genealogist might find his or her ancestor in the minutes of a city, village or township. Although you might not find the papers connected to the meeting, these minutes might give a genealogist some insight into the lives of his or her ancestors and life in the locality that that ancestor had lived in. I do not know for sure if these types of records are used at all in genealogical research, but I thought I would mention this in case these records were under-utilized by genealogists. Anyhow, it is just a suggestion that I thought I would share.

1 comment:

Miriam Robbins said...

Jessica, the proceedings of the City Commission of Grand Rapids for May 7, 1906 to May 7, 1907 can be found on Google Book Search here. I discovered this when I did a search for one of my surnames, TUINSTRA. I found that Jan "John" Tuinstra, who peddled flowers and fruit from the family farm in Walker Township, applied for a huckster's permit for the 1906 - 1907 year (page 7). He was granted his request (page 34).

There are also proceedings for the years 1902/3, 1903/4, and 1905/6. They are wonderful resources!