The Chicago Biography and Industry File is now online!

We've added locations of pre-1928 Chicago synagogues to ChicagoAncestors. The mapping is based on Chicago city directory listings supplemented with information from secondary sources, Chicago newspapers and congregational websites. In some cases, entries on specific congregations include brief histories and bibliographic citations, while others simply indicate the year the location was listed in the city directory.

Our summer intern Elyse Kallen did a huge amount of work on ChicagoAncestors in the past few months. She geocoded and uploaded over 1,200 homicide records from the period 1897-1904. She also added links to the excellent articles on the Edgewater Historical Society website. Thanks, Elyse!

The Cook County Clerk's office has launched its new website indexing marriage, birth and death records from 1872 forward: http://www.cookcountygenealogy.com/ Once you find the record you're looking for you can pay online ($15.00 plus a $1.75 fee per transaction) and download a compressed file containing a TIFF image of the document.

Note that not all records are online yet, so you may need to keep checking back to find the records you're looking for. And remember that most county records were destroyed in the fire of 1871.

A Newberry Library Event

Chicago Lithuanians and The Jungle
Wednesday, February 13, 6:00 pm
60 W. Walton
Chicago, IL 60634
Speaker: Giedrius Subaèius

Professor Giedrius Subaèius will discuss Lithuanian Chicago in the context of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. The lecture will focus on the history of the Chicago Lithuanian community and the real-life Lithuanians whom Sinclair might have met in Chicago. The talk will provide a great case-study for researchers interested in Chicago's ethnic communities.

We've just added links to over 200 Chicago documents from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) from the Library of Congress. HABS is an ongoing effort to document "achievements in architecture, engineering, and design." It began in 1933 and has been administered jointly by the Library of Congress and the National Park Service. The Library of Congress has digitized photographs, drawings and other data from the project. For more information on the project, visit the HABS page of the American Memory site. An interesting side note: a number of these photographs were taken by famed Chicago photographer and preservationist Richard Nickel.

We're happy to announce that some new interactive features have been added to ChicagoAncestors.org.

1.Registered users now have the ability to add content to the map. If you have registered and created a profile, you can now add your own map points to the site. Map where your ancestors live, or historical locations in your Chicago neighborhood. What you map is up to you! We just ask that: your information be historical in nature, appropriate for an audience of all ages, and that you do not post material that is in copyright, unless you are the copyright holder.

We started this project using data on Chicago Catholic Churches, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America Churches, yearbook collections in local libraries, neighborhood histories at the Newberry Library and information from the Chicago Historical Homicide Project done by Northwestern University School of Law. But this is JUST the start!