Searchable Illinois Physcian Database Online

James Craig Small 1917

The Illinois State Archives is happy to announce that the Physician Database is now available on CyberDriveIllinois

The database consists of more than 62,700 physicians and surgeons who registered for license with the Illinois State Board of Health and the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation. The records span August 1877 to February 17, 1937.

The database contains more than 62,700 names of physicians or surgeons. Entries include the physician’s full name; certificate number issued; the known counties where the physician resided; year of registration or certificate issuance; and the volume and page numbers of the register where the physician’s entry appeared. Beginning in September 1898, the line number on the register page containing the entry is also listed. The date of birth for each physician or surgeon is included starting in 1924. Register entries occasionally listed multiple registration dates, counties, or ages for some physicians or surgeons.

Each database entry contains a link to the image of the register pages containing the physician’s entry.Here is the entry for the image above

Name James Craig Small

Certificate Number 12787

Line Number 7

Original Volume & Page #'s V. 11, n.p.

Year of License 1917

Residence/Location (Illinois Counties Listed) Cook

Are You a Pier or Peer Descendant?

My 4th great-grandfather Jacob Peer, the immigrant ancestor to Ontario, was living in Newton Township, Sussex County, New Jersey in 1774. Jacob was forced to leave New Jersey because of his British sympathies during the American Revolution. He settled near Hamilton Ontario in June 1796.

Jacob and his family lost everything in New Jersey and settled in what was then the wilderness of Upper Canada where they had to make a new life for themselves. Jacob and his 6 sons and 2 daughters had many descendants settling in Ontario, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

This is one of the immigrant families I researched and wrote about in a 6-volume set called The Peer Family in North America. The hardships they endured were felt by many in those turbulent times and I wanted their stories told.

The available Peer Family books are:

Peer Family in North America: V.1 Jacob & Anne Peer, Immigrants from New Jersey to Upper Canada in 1796. Revised Edition published April 2016

The Peer Family in North America: V.2 Levi Peer & Elizabeth Marical and their Descendants to 3 Generations

The Peer Family in North America: V.3 Edward Peer & His Two Wives and their Descendants to 3 Generations

The Peer Family in North America: V.4 Philip Peer & his two Wives Ester Dunn and Susan Griniaus and their Descendants to 3 Generations 

The Peer Family in North America: V. 5 Stephen Peer & His Wife Lydia Skinner and their Descendants to 3 Generations 

The Peer Family in North America: V6 Jacob Peer Jr. and his wife Lucy Powers and their Descendants to 2 Generations     

Why not join our Peer Genealogy Group on Facebook? You can share with other members, ask for help with a challenging Peer or Pier ancestor and join in discussions.

1797, 13 July: Declared in his land petition that he came to the province in June 1796 and had a wife and daughter in Barton where he owned a farm.  He was granted 200 acres on 14 July 1797. A statement by Nathaniel Pettit dated 10 July 1797 states that he was acquainted with Jacob Pear [sic] in the State of New Jersey, and that because he was "much attached to the British Constitution" he "suffered greatly both in his person and property in the Late War between Great Britain and America"



 

Rescued Letter to Donald Morgan of New York 1943

This is another rescued document from Davis Kennels in Joliet Illinois to Donald E. Morgan of Clay New York dated August 30, 1943.

Davis Kennels (Wm. A. Davis) is informing Mr. Morgan about their black, white, and tan Bassett pups.

Thanks to Annette P. for sending this document to Olive Tree Genealogy for publication

How an antique Illinois Family Photo Album came to Canada via New Jersey

My good friend Illya of LiveRoots.com sent me a gift several years ago of an antique photo album. The Album has had a rough life, and needed a good home, so Illya bid on it at a New Jersey auction, won the album and shipped it to me here in Canada.

Bertha Timmerman Fichter

The album has slots for 64 cabinet cards, and one tintype. 2 Cabinet Cards are missing, for a total of 63 ancestor family photos in this album. 15 of the Cabinet Card photographs were identified with writing on the album pages.

With the identification of those 15 photos and the clues from the photographers who took the photographs, I was able to find the family in the census for Chicago Illinois and determine that this album belonged to the Timmerman Family.

The Timmerman Family Photo Album is full of beautiful photographs, most taken in the period 1890 - 1910. Most of the photos were taken by photographers in Chicago Illinois - Morrison, Jaeger, Hoffman Studios, Vahlteich and others. A few were taken in Omaha Nebraska.

I wondered how a Chicago Photo Album over 100 years old ended up at a New Jersey auction, but research found that one of the Timmerman daughters (Bertha Timmerman) married a man named George Fichtner and moved from Chicago to Boontown New Jersey sometime between 1910 and 1920. No doubt the album was cared for by this daughter and her descendants for many years.

Olive Tree Genealogy has scanned several of the photos and published them online for all descendants and interested researchers to enjoy. I will be scanning all the photos and placing them all online in hopes that genealogists will recognize an ancestor. I've also written up the genealogy research I did on the Timmerman family and published it online as well. Hopefully interested descendants will enjoy this look into the family photographs of more than 100 years ago.

There are 63 other antique family photo albums (mostly from the Civil War era) online on Lost Faces on Olive Tree Genealogy website. More are being added as I scan them.

Bringing the Dead Back to Life: An Eagle Scout's Project

"David Swegle wanted to do something unique for his Eagle Scout community project, and bringing the dead back to life certainly qualifies for that category." Source NWHerald.com

Example of Buried Tombstone

David Swegle, 15, knew that he wanted to contribute to the community in his Illinois town with something historical in origin.

So he contacted the nearby Lee County Historical and Genealogical Society to ask if they had any projects on the go. He was put in touch with President Pat Gorman who had been restoring grave markers in the Oakwood cemetery in his spare time

15 year old Swegle worked with Gorman and identified eight stones that had been buried, broken or displaced, the oldest of which dates to 1845 and belongs to 2-month-old William McCraw.

They began digging up the buried stones, cleaning with a special solution to removie algae and other material, scrubbing the stones, and hosing them off.

Then they re-lettered the stones using pungent, dark shadow paint. The repaired stones will be replaced in the spring. Young David also plans to research the people whose stones he repaired to discover pieces of their history and their family. Officials believe there may be over 100 stones that are buried.

Read the full story at Dixon Boy Scout rehabs 8 tombstones in Oakwood Cemetery

If you have Illiinois ancestors check out the Chicago Tribune Archives in Beta (Free)

The Chicago Tribune archives are online and searchable from 1849 to 1991. This is a Beta Version and for now it's free. 

However when the beta is over, researchers will need to sign up for a digitalPLUS membership (details here) for full access to the archives.

Thanks to Gail Dever for posting the link to this newspaper database.

Earl G. Gregory's WW2 Navy ID Tags Need to Go Home (Case #24)

Sue wrote to Olive Tree Genealogy with a request for help sending a WW2 Navy ID Tag back to family

I would like to find a home for the attached dog tag.  My father ran a wrecker service in DeKalb, Illinois and found this in a car many years ago.  It is for Earl George Gregory.

After receiving Sue's email I did some research. The first thing I noticed was that this was a Navy ID Tag (USN on the tag)

A search on Ancestry.com found this record for Earl:

Earl George Gregory
Service Info.: CWT US NAVY WORLD WAR II
Birth Date:18 Dec 1916
Death Date:11 Jun 1990
Cemetery:Thomason Cemetery
Cemetery Address:Main St Wayne City, IL 62895

Find-A-Grave shows his wife as Anna, buried with him.

If you can help find Earl's family, we can add this to our solved cases with a happy ending. There is probably a family member who would treasure this item, let's help find Earl's family and send it home.  

Operation Reunite - Returning Military Medals to Soldiers

Operation Reunite is a very impressive effort on the part of the Illinois State Treasurer. To quote from their website:

The Unclaimed Property Division of the Illinois State Treasurer’s Office presently has in its care nearly 200 items belonging to past and present servicemen and women. These items include military medals, artifacts, ribbons, and awards spanning more than a century of American conflict. One military medal even dates back to the Spanish American War circa 1898. Other priceless items include service records, dog tags and commendations from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

It is the goal of the Illinois State Treasurer's Office to reunite these very important military medals and awards with the men and women who earned them through their great sacrifice and service. 

Please take a look at the list of names who either were given the medals or who have a connection to the original medal owner. Perhaps you will spot an ancestor or relative!

Before leaving, please take a moment to view Olive Tree Genealogy's Soldiers Dog Tag Cases. Some are still unresolved meaning we have not yet found a descendant to send the found dog tag home.

Burr Oak Cemetery Cook County Illinois Online

Burr Oak Cemetery where 300 graves were illegally disinterred and the plots resold, has now been placed online by the Cook County Sheriff's Office. Families can now browse the photographs of headstones and also search for an ancestor's name in the database search engine

As well, the entire Cemetery database in cvs format has been placed online for those interested to download. This file can opened by most spreadsheet programs. I used Excel to view it.

There are some problems with the database. Genealogists will discover that some names and dates in the photos are not the same as the names and dates in the database. But this is a very small hiccup because you can check the online Cook County Death Indexes for verification, or census records (I use Ancestry.com for my census searches)

We must remember that it was not genealogists who created the database, it was the Cook County Sheriff's office. They compiled this database in record time and relatives and descendants will find it very useful, even with the discrepancies.

... Read more about the tragedy at Burr Oak Cemetery

Problems with Cook County,Illinois Death Index, 1908-1988?

Richard Carruthers wrote to AskOliveTree.blogspot.com with a very informative and interesting study he has undertaken.

Because Richard's email is quite long I have edited it for publication here on OliveTreeGenealogy.blogspot.com. It will be useful for thos searching in Cook County Illinois Death Records on Ancestry.com

In 1886, Edmond Henry ROBERTS) married Illinois-native, Minnie C.
SMITH. They had four daughters and one son all born in Illinois between 1887 and 1903. I have located all but the youngest daughter in on-line Cook County birth indexes on the new LDS prototype page.

I checked the "Cook County,Illinois Death Index, 1908-1988" which is online at Ancestry.comand found no relevant entries. I have tried
several ways to search for them, and have had some very curious results about which I thought you might like to know and consider.

First, in the search box provided by ancestry.com, I put in the surname ROBERTS. That yielded a total of 2,058 results for the entire span of the collection, but no Edmond/Edmund ROBERTS entries at all. There were 5 records for a Minnie ROBERTS, but the likeliest who died in 1943 when our Minnie (SMITH) ROBERTS would have been about 75 years old, turned out to be for a Minnie Spencer ROBERTS

Then I looked more carefully through my old files, and found that years ago (on 30 May 2000!), I had copied from LDS microfiche number 6016533, records from the actual index produced by Cook county, which covers much of Chicago. Labelled "Cook County Illinois Bureau of Vital Statistics 1877-1916", and had found the following entries which looked promising:

on MFC 53/70 (all bearing the number 6016533)

Name Date of Death Age Place Certificate Number
ROBERTS, Edmund H.; Dec 14 1911; 50 YR; Chicago; 0000016378
ROBERTS, Minnie; Feb 7 1911; ?40 YR; Chicago; 0000016096
ROBERTS, Minnie; Dec 3 1915; 30; Chicago; 0000017450

Armed with this information, I returned to the ancestry.com database 1908-1988 decided to leave all fields except the one for the year blank in the search box. It turned out that no death records are indexed for anyone dying in Cook county, Illinois in 1911 appear in the index. Then I tried a bunch of other years, and finally did a systematic search of records using only the year in the box provided
for that. The results that yielded were very interesting and rather disappointing.

First off, the database actually contains death records starting as early as 1897, but missing for 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, and 1914 entirely. For the rest of the years to 1916 I got the following results:

1897-1 record
1898-10,858 records
1899-8,513 records
1900-14,040 records
1901-7,964 records
1902-5,872 records
1903-4,903 records
1904-3,393 records
1905-2,335 records
1906-4,234 records
1907-6,487 records
1908-14,918 records
1909-287 records
1910-1914 no records at all!
1915-35,402 records
1916-39,673 records

These are records for a database that supposedly covers the period 1908-1988 and contains 2.7 million records according to ancestry.com's own on-line information!

Examining the entries over the foregoing period, I discovered that from 1897-1915 all the records appear to cover only names where the first name is made up of two letters and the last name is made of four letters! Most of these names appear to be entirely nonsensical. I suppose that some of them may include the deceased person's initial and the first four letters of their surname, but this is by no means clear. There is no explanation of this shortcoming in the explanatory information that ancestry.com provides about this database. It is surely relevant, too, that only in 1916 do real names as we use them appear in the index. At least I can report that this happens most of the time. Some records still appear in the 2-4 letter format of the earlier years.

Clearly there are problems with this database. I know from the microfiche that the real records indexed by Cook County, Illinois's Bureau of Vital Statistics exist for the period 1871-1916 in an entirely comprehensible, standard format. What then is the online database purporting to cover the period 1908-1988? For one thing, it
doesn't cover all the years from 1908 to 1988 as advertised, and in fact contains records from at least a decade earlier. The coverage, however, only appears to begin to be accurate from 1916, though it still has some of the problem material over the earlier years I've already outlined. It's really misleading to a researcher not to be
alerted to these deficiencies in the ancestry.com version of the index.

Who can Identify this Mystery Building circa 1870s?

This is a photo (a CDV or Carte de visite) of a mystery building with a crowd of men and women in front.

Some are looking out the windows of this building which is draped in bunting. A photograph of a man is placed over the front door and you can see the crush of people at the door.

My best guess is that this is a funeral, perhaps of a President, certainly of an important man.

From the type of photograph (Carte de Visite), the clothing styles, with the women in bustle dresses and hats perched atop their heads, and the men in bowlers and long coats, I estimate the date to be circa 1872-1880. However bowler hats were worn from 1850-1900 and bustles were in style from about 1860-1900 so it is difficult to narrow the timeline with certainty.

What I would like to know is

* What and where is this building?

* What is the occassion?

The only other clues I have are that this photograph was the last in an album of Cabinet Cards from Chicago Illinois photographers. Two were from Omaha Nebraska but more than 60 of the photos in the album were from Chicago. The image itself is not clear, it is rather fuzzy and faded so it is not possible to make out good details. In fact, I manipulated the colours and the sharpness of the original in order to get as clear and sharp an image as possible to post here.

Anyone care to guess what this building is and where it is?

PEER Genealogy Puzzler for February

This ia Genealogy Puzzle for February. I'm hopeful a reader can point me in the right direction to find answers to any of my unknowns below, OR knows of a researcher for hire.

Here are the facts around the puzzle:

* circa 1817/1818 Edward PEER and family (wife Anna) settled in Northeast Twp Erie Co. Pennsylvania.

Edward and son John are found in 1820 census for Northeast (1820 Census for NorthEast Twp. Erie Co. PA lists Edward PIER and John PIER)

* Levi Peer born circa 1760 in New Jersey, settled across the border in Ripley, Chautauga Co NY circa 1817/1818. Sometime between 1825 and 1830, Levi PEER sold his New York land and settled with Edward Peer in Erie Pennsylvania.

Levi and family - wife Elizabeth and children - are found in the 1830 census for Northeast PA. This Levi Peer is NOT the Levi Peer (Pier) born 1754 who married Ann Dewey and settled in Busti New York

* In August 1831 Levi and family bought land in Illinois and prepared to settle there. Levi Sr. died before the family arrived in Illinois, perhaps before they left.

What I am looking for is:

1. Will for Edward PEER (Pier, Pear) who is buried in Philips Cemetery, Northeast Twp with a death date of 9 Nov.1834. His wife Sarah died 16 march 1833 and is buried in the same cemetery.

Edward's known children were John L. Peer b ca 1792 Canada; Mercy aka Phoebe Peer b ca 1800 Ontario married Mr. Averill (Stephen?) in Northeast PA date uknown and Lewis A. Peer b 1802 Ontario married Charlotte unk. in Northeast PA. Lewis is buried in Philips cemetery, death date 8 Nov. 1891

2. Will and/or grave record for Levi PEER (Pier, Pear) who died circa 1831, perhaps August in Northeast PA. Levi was married to Elizabeth. His known children (Levi, William,Abraham, Rachel, Hiram and Eliza Jane) all left PA for IL in 1831 along with their mother. It is assumed that Levi died in Northeast PA shortly before they left.

3. Land Records for both Levi and Edward. (or other Peer individuals) in Northeast PA. I have one land record, (but I'm sure there are more as both men owned extensive land holdings everywhere they lived) for 28 April 1825. It is an Indenture between Edward Peer and Sarah, his wife of the town of Northeast, Erie Co. PA, and Elizabeth Peer, wife of Levi Peer, town of Ripley, Chautauqua Co. NY, parties of the first part, and James McClung of the second part. The parties of the first part sell for 1400.00 50 acres of land in the town of Ripley - Township #3, 15th Range.

4. Tax or Assessment records for 1817-1834

So, that is my February challenge. Can anyone offer ideas, suggestions or even answers to this PEER puzzle?

Cook Co.Illinois Records going online

Genealogists and people interested in researching their family tree will soon be able to access key records from their home computer instead of ordering by mail or traipsing down to the Cook County offices

Digitized versions of county records such as birth and death certificates and marriage licenses should be available beginning in January 2008 on one searchable Web site

The Web site is part of a year long effort to digitize the county's 24 million vital records, which date to 1871, when record-keeping began after the Chicago Fire destroyed earlier records

Documents available online will be birth certificates that are at least 75 years old, marriage certificates more than 50 years old, and death certificates more than 20 years old. Read the full article

Illinois Documents online

Here is a list of ILLINOIS documents that are online on various blogs. Just look for the Blog Archives under the date shown beside each document title, or use the Blogger Search Engine (top left) to search each blog by keyword

Feel free to share this list with others!

http://familybibles.blogspot.com/ If you can't find the photo album on this blog, go directly to http://www.rootsweb.com/~ote/faces/

Civil War Burtch Family Photo Album England, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island

Clarke Family of New York Photo Album Illinois, New York, Wisconsin

Cardiff Harrold Family Photo Album Connecticut, Illinois, Italy, New York, Pennsylvania

Civil War Kelley Family Photo Album Germany, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas

Civil War Era Fobes Family Album Massachusetts, Ne... Civil War, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York

HALLADAY Bible 1840s Illinois, New York, Vermont 12/29/04

Family Bible of Funk, Ritchie and Lynch Families Illinois, Missouri, Virginia

http://paper-trail.blogspot.com/

Obituary Hattie Wilson 1888 Illinois Illinois, Obituary 2/9/07

1865 INTERNAL REVENUE TAX COLLECTION NOTICE Chicag... Illinois

http://ancestorsatrest.blogspot.com/

Obit Hattie Wilson Illinois 1888 Illinois

OBIT: Valeria Carattinia, Illinois Illinois

http://pastvoices.blogspot.com/

Civil War: Charlotte Couch, Illinois 1865 Illinois 7/30/04

Emma Wadsworth Letter, 1865 Illinois 6/27/04

Civil War: H. M. Parker, Illinois 1862 Illinois