Don't blink

Frenchtown held a zoom genealogy event last night for a small but dedicated band of historians. The application process to attend was stringent, but we are confident that we accepted only the finest people into our publically available zoom, and our conversation reflected it.

Preparing this event, I encountered a few disagreeable surprises. BLM General Land Office (GLO), has revised their whole website and search interface. Change is often an aggravation, when you have to learn a whole new system to do a familiar task. The old GLO site was old school internet by most standards, but workable, and I knew how to use it. I assume I’ll learn how to drive the new interface as well.

They took something important away, however. You can no longer download your results. No CSV, no export, no save. You can download individual document scans, but the site’s (yes, very clunky) previous capacity to ask larger questions about the history of land transactions has been shut down. This feels intentional, it feels like an attempt to limit access to historical information, and I’m kinda steamed about it. How intentional is it? Well, you can no longer even view the old interface on the wayback machine — it redirects you to the new site, which is only a few weeks old.

Some tips for navigating the new site — the map search is not working yet, go straight to advanced. You will have more filter options in a left menu once you get past the first search screen; work your way in from a larger area or time to a more specific result. Indian land patents (several kinds) are hidden under “Other” and then “Authority”, and not “Document type,” which is where you’ll find the homestead patents.

This PLSS viewer is a handy little tool to browse range and township coordinates, which are useful both for finding land records and then for interpreting what you’ve found. Land in the Walla Walla and Umatilla area is surveyed from the Willamette Meridian.

Disagreeable surprise part II: Familysearch has wonderful stuff, and I’ll tell you about some new goodies I found for our questions in a minute. However, it also had, until less than a week ago, the option to filter your census search results by race as well as sex, place, date, etc.. Sex is still a filter choice — but the race option has disappeared. The information still exists in the actual documents, but you can no longer use their indexes to look for, say, Indigenous women living in mixed or white communities. Again, this feels intentional, it feels like an attempt to limit access to certain kinds of historical information… and I’m kinda steamed about it.

On a more positive note, Family Search has added a full-text search option that in some cases is a real game changer. Like the National Archives, they host many large digitized microfilm collections, documents that frequently run up to a thousand pages or more. These documents are not indexed, and if you wanted to, for example, work with the Chemawa records on Family Search, you were stuck with scrolling. Now, with the new full text search (go to “Search”, “Full Text”, and combine a name and a place or date), we’ll be able to actually use some of these records. For example, I now know that Mathilda Archambault was treated at Chemawa for tonsillities in April of 1889.

I’ll post some more of the references from our zoom event over the next week or two. In the mean time, save your search results where you still can - they might not be there when you go back.

©Sarah Hurlburt, on behalf of the Frenchtown Historical Foundation