Archive for the ‘Idaho’ Category
Happy Birthday, Idaho Territory!
On this day in 1863, Idaho Territory was spun off from Washington Territory.
Finding Philippine Insurrection Military Service Records
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In March 1899, the United States Congress authorized the Secretary of War to recruit and enlist up to 35,000 volunteers to go to the Philippine Islands to put down an uprising. More than 125,000 soldiers from California, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming were involved, and over 4,000 of them died in the conflict. Two battalions of Philippine scouts and a squadron of Philippine cavalry were also involved. Soldiers from the Regular Army also served.
The National Archives and Records Administration has an alphabetical card index to Philippine Insurrection volunteer soldiers’ compiled service records. The index entries give information about the soldier’s name, rank, and unit, or units he served with. The service records referred to by the index are organized by regiment and then by soldier’s name. Details about Regular Army soldiers who served in the Philippine Insurrection will be included in other records.
The records this index refers the user to include a jacket-envelope for each soldier, labeled with his name, containing
- card abstracts of entries relating to the soldier as found primarily in original muster rolls and returns, but occasionally in other records such as pay vouchers, and
- the originals of any papers relating solely to the particular soldier.
A separate group of personal papers follows the compiled service records. These may include personal papers referred to in the index. These papers were accumulated by the War Department to be filed with the regular series of compiled service records. The papers were not inter-filed for one reason or another. There are no compiled service records for soldiers whose index cards contain cross-references to the miscellaneous personal papers.
Pension application files may be available from the Veterans Administration.
Finding Names in the Index
The best thing to know about finding a soldier in this record group is to know the unit or units he served with. A volunteer soldier who served during the Philippine Insurrection may not be listed in the index because he
- may have been in Regular Army unit
- may have used a different name, alias, a different spelling
- proper service records may not have been made
- his service record may have been lost or destroyed
- there may be only vague references to the soldier in the original records
Knowing any nicknames or other variations of the soldier’s name helps. Knowing the Soundex code variations on the name may also improve search results. Good sources of name variations include personal papers, other military records, newspaper accounts of the conflict, and local histories.
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NARA has fact-sheets about these records
- M872 – Index to Compiled Service Records of Volunteer Soldiers Who Served during the Philippine Insurrection. 24 rolls.
- T288 – General Index to Pension Files, 1861-1934. 544 rolls.
A microfilm copy of these indexes is located at NARA’s Pacific Alaska Region Seattle facility.
Where to Find Idaho’s Federal Land Records
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Between 1860 and 1934 the U. S. government kept records of all federal land transactions in Idaho. These records can contain genealogically significant information.
The records include land transactions under various laws and acts, including: donation land, homesteads, timber and stone, timber culture, desert land, mining, and some cash sales. The records also include tract books (township, range, section, and fraction of section) with lists of owners.
There are records of homestead entries and final certificates, desert land declarations and entries, timber culture entries, abstracts of land sold, and patents delivered.
Federal Land Offices were located in various places over the years, including: Blackfoot, Boise, Coeur d’Alene (most records lost in fire), Hailey, Lewiston, and Oxford.
The records here do not include the land entry case files. Those records are available from the National Archives, in Washington, D. C. Record copies of donation land patents issued are kept by the Bureau of Land Management, and are not included here.
Some information on this page has been summarized from NARA publication M1620 — Federal Land Records for Idaho, 1860–1934.
Copies of these records are kept at the National Archives and Records Administration’s Pacific Alaska Region facility in Seattle, Washington, where I am a professional genealogy researcher. Contact me to start a discussion about the possibilities of researching your family’s history. Likewise, if you would like more information about my genealogical research services, including information about fees, and range of materials available to research, I’d love to hear from you.
Research Look-up Listings
Over the past weekend and week I restructured my professional research strategy on GenLighten.com. The new listings are
- Idaho Federal Land Records – 1860 to 1934
- Oregon Federal Land Records – 1851 to 1908
- Washington State Federal Land Records – 1855 to 1910
- Oregon Naturalization Records – 1859 to 1956
- Washington State Naturalization Records – 1850 to 1974
- Seattle, Washington Obituary Look-ups – 1888 to 2011
Most of these records are National Archives and Records Administration microfilm holdings at the Pacific Alaska Region facility in Seattle. Depending on site availability, I can use different archives for the obituary lookups.
Feel free to post questions about the listings and specific items on that site.
Other obituary and newspaper item look-ups are also possible, using a custom look-up request mechanism on the GenLighten site.
Re-starting look-up services
I’m planning to begin offering look-up services in Pacific Northwest area archives in the coming weeks. I’ve been a member of Genealogy Freelancers for some time and had participated in the GenLighten.com beta several years ago. I’ll be restructuring my offerings and fees this weekend and should have them posted on those sites next week sometime.
You may see references to SeaGenes.com in some of my older posts. That site name has been taken over by a completely unrelated person and does not deal with genealogical issues. I think it was an unfortunate occurrence, but it was unavoidable under the circumstances. Seattle Book Scouts is also no longer functioning as a web site at SeattleBookScouts.com, so those references should also be avoided.
