Greetings!

We hope you are enjoying wonderful holidays and that your and your families will experience the joy of community and sharing ... as we have here at The POORHOUSE STORY during this season of Thanksgiving. Our greatest blessing has been the growing sense of community among our readers .... who do a lot more than just read! We want to give you our special Thanks and hope that we will continue to enjoy our association in the New Year.

REFLECTIONS

The opportunity which the internet affords continuously expands and constantly amazes us! When we first started this website ...
only a little over 6 months ago ... what we received from readers was mostly questions; now we get answers and wonderful cooperative efforts to do research and share what we discover together. Ohio readers (through the Rootsweb mailing lists) have pitched in to divide up a massive amount of information which a professional genealogist and librarian sent to us ... so that we can get it posted to the site. Historians have sent us unpublished articles to publish. Publishers have been very generous giving permission for us to both link to and copy wonderful articles. A huge number of people have written to share their insights and memories and to give us detailed local information about poorhouse history. Folks who transcribe census and cemetery records for posting on other sites often discover poorhouse listings and share them with us. And many, many folks have taken time to help us enter data. Some even specialize in "surfing the net" for us -- sleuthing for poorhouse leads and e-mailing the tidbits that they find! There are too many people to name ... and in my "senior moments" I would undoubtedly forget some and feel awful about that ... so just keep reading these newsletters to keep posted. (And you might want to use those e-mail addresses of submitters to drop them a note of thanks now and then!) So Maddie & I no longer feel like  two people with a rather off-beat historical interest ... but part of a community which we enjoy and for which we give Thanks. 

nearly 23,000  

27486 as of 11/30

335 as of 10/30/00

378 as of 11/28/00

We are privileged to have had historian Jean F. Hankins allow us to present  her previously unpublished article --
 "OVER THE HILL TO THE POORHOUSE":  
              The Otisfield Town Farm, 1865 - 1924. 
[CUMBERLAND County]  This article gives perspective on historic poorhouse trends  throughout the state, and it will be of interest to residents of other counties as well. .                                                    

An excellent article from the Sun-Journal (June 14, 1997) titled:
Norlands Seminar:  
19th century poverty full of indignities
[This is a "Must Read!" for anyone interest in Maine history.   The page will take a while to load because we used scans to retain the style of the original newspaper article.PHL ]

See this photo article about the removal of children from the Kanawha County Poorhouse [West Virginia]  in 1934. 

submitted by Mabel Wilson Mabelwilsn@aol.com 

Mary Douglass, CGRS, 259 N. Kansas Ave., Salina, KS 67401-8515 
or e-mail: mdoug-hm@swbell.net 

 Thank you for your help!

Current

PENNSYLVANIA: has demonstrated a remarkable degree of commitment to the preservation of poorhouse history! That has expanded to the inclusion of on-line name indexes for the poorhouse inmate registers (an on-going project).

Previous

Illinois & Tennessee

IL

NY

Allegany/Oswego/Wayne

NEB

Furnas

OH

Hamilton/Harrison/Holmes/Tuscarawas/Washington

NJ

NEB

Hamilton

NY

Warren

                                         We posted this link to a great site!  >>>

Kosciusko 

County Farm Records 1879 - 1953  

This is a huge database -- "Over 1500 records covering individuals at the County Farm (also known as the County Infirmary)" on the Kosciusko County GenWeb site at http://www.rootsweb.com/~inkosciu/cofarm.htm  
[ We know how much work this must have been for Sue Zellers and wish to offer our sincere thanks! In many ways, this format (an alphabetized list) offers many more context clues and is for that reason much more useful than a simple searchable database.]

NY

Note: There is a strange website (about which I can't find out much of anything!) which has a link to a page titled "Poor House Inmates--Onondaga, New York: A list of names of inmates obtained from county records." No further documentation is given. I usually limit the data published on The POORHOUSE STORY website to things that I can verify better than that. But you may wish to take a look for yourselves. The fact that the URL for the page contains the word "indentured" may provide a clue to what kind of records these were. But it should be noted that indentures were usually only done for people (usually children) who were "bound out" to someone in the community.   PHL

IN

MI

Presque Isle

Poorhouse Resident lists from CENSUS

1850

1860

NY

Montgomery

1870

NY

Montgomery

1900

NEB 

Hamilton

The Poorhouse in Literature
http://www.poorhousestory.com/literature.htm

Survey of Poorhouse Records Holdings of the OREGON  State Archives and local government records.

Thanks for your continued support.
Linda Crannell
(aka=The Poorhouse Lady)