Looking for information about one’s ancestors can be a daunting (and sometimes expensive) task. There are quite a few online databases and websites like Ancestry.com or Genealogy.com that can help fill in the holes of your family tree, but they are not cheap.  Here at Special Collections, researching family trees has become a bit of a hobby for one of our employees. We are extremely lucky here to have plenty of resources in a number of forms including print, digital, and microforms. However, a lot of people have no clue how to begin to look for an elusive ancestor. Although census records and birth certificates can tell a lot, they sometimes do not tell the whole story about a person.

Take for instance the story of a 56 year old gentleman, George Valentine, who lived in what is now Ritchie County, West Virginia in 1862. The census records during his lifetime can give information about his name, occupation, family, where he was born, and age (thereby cluing the researcher into George Valentine’s birth year). However, if you search alphabetically in the Union Provost Marshals’ file of Papers Relating to Individual Civilians, you will find that George Valentine was arrested by Union troops for being a noted rebel in October 1861 and shipped off to Camp Chase in Ohio, a notorious Union prison where 2260 prisoners died from bad conditions including lack of food, water, clothing, and sanitation.  You would also find a letter, hand-written by Mr. Valentine’s captor to the Governor of Ohio, giving Mr. Valentine over to the governor’s care.

If your ancestor possibly attended the University of Missouri, you should check out Special Collections’ MU collection. We have publications from various departments on campus.  One of our biggest periodical collections is the MU Savitar. The yearbook, which ran from 1894-2005, includes photographs and stories of thousands of students who have roamed the hallowed grounds of Mizzou for over one hundred years. If you are too far away from the MU campus, you should check out the digitized Savitar collection here.

Plat books contain a wealth of names and information of landowners in a particular county or state. Like the Savitar, most of the Missouri county plat books have been digitized, making it convenient to access nice clear scans of every page from anywhere. If you have an approximate idea of where an ancestor lived at a given point in time, you can usually find their name written in a plat book and estimate how much land the owned.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps date back to 1867. They were originally created to assess fire liability and risk, but are used now to see a snapshot of a town or city during the past. This is a great way to find the general store that your great-grandfather ran back in 1905, or his house in 1912. Not only does Special Collections hold an extensive collection of Missouri Sanborn maps, but they have been digitized and put online as well. Furthermore, other states have also digitized their collections.

Finally, Special Collections is the home of one of the largest microform collections in North America. Many of these sets come with their own print guides and indexes. Various microform collections that might of interest to genealogical researchers include the “The Immigrant in America”, extensive personal papers and correspondence of many American pioneers, and our large volume of early American newspapers and periodicals. We also have indexes of many major American newspapers like the New York Times, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and the Atlanta Constitution, so it is easy to look up someone’s name or a historical event and find the exact date and page number where they were mentioned.

As Missourians, we are truly lucky to have so much in genealogical information readily available.  Although there is a lot that has been put online for easy access, we also have a small staff here at Special Collections ready to help you find what you need up on the fourth floor of Ellis Library.  Even though none of us are trained genealogical experts, we can usually point you in the right direction.  For Missouri-specific inquiries, the State Historical Society is housed in the same building, and can often provide information that we may not have here.  Furthermore, the largest free-standing genealogical library the Midwest Genealogy Center, is located near Kansas City.   Finally, if you find yourself lost, contact us and we can provide you with names of local professional genealogists.

Today marks the anniversary of the death by beheading of Saint Cyriacus and his companions, Largus and Smaragdus. They had fallen afoul of the Emperor Diocletian.  Cyriacus had converted the daughter of the emperor, then went on to stage a mass baptism at the court of a Persian King. Cyriacus and company were tortured and beheaded on this day in the year 303. Their relics were placed in the Church of Saint Maria, in Via Lata, in Rome.

The images you see here are from the front and back of a leaf from a twelfth-century English martyrology in our Fragmenta Manuscripta collection. Martyrologies were anthologies that provided narratives of the lives and passions of saints, arranged according to their feast day. These were read aloud in monastic houses during the office of prime.  The image on the left is the recto. The reading for Saint Cyriacus begins in the middle of the page, where you see the rubric and a fine blue and ochre arabesque initial. The leaf was trimmed along the bottom so it is not continuous with the text on the top of the verso of the folio (below). The text there provides the rationale for the day’s celebration: “However often we brothers celebrate their martyrdom, so often we say praise of the savior. And however often we observe their passions; so often we proclaim the grace of Christ.” The text on the verso looks forward to the Day of Judgment: “And because in the present age the faults of many are not known but in the future time it will be written, when god will judge the hidden things of men and will illuminate dark hiding places and will make manifest the heart’s deliberation. It will be known.  Do not fear the fury of persecutors. And the madness of blasphemers because the God of judgment will come, whereby our virtue and their wickedness will be demonstrated.”

We encourage you to join us in observing  this solemn occasion with a visit to the Rare Books Room.

According to an article published in the Weekly World News, the temperature of hell is precisely 285 degrees Fahrenheit. When temperatures soar, it is good to be reminded that there are hotter places than Columbia, Missouri. Many whose works are represented in our collections have depicted hell to provide an avenue for encouraging better behavior, or, more recently, for providing entertainment. Perusing their works also provides an avenue for indulging schadenfreude. This week we bring together works from our collection of diverse periods and genres that share a fascination with hell.

The parable of Dives and Lazarus will be well known to many. To summarize, in life, the rich man (Dives) ignores the plight of Lazarus, a leprous beggar outside his gates. After death, however, the circumstances  of the two men are reversed:

“The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom. And he called out, `Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame."

Larazus, though willing, is not permitted, and the rich man is left to suffer his torments without relief.

The image above on the right comes from a copiously illustrated late nineteenth-century Bible from our Rare Books Collection. The image above left is of a miniature illustrating Luke 19-31. It comes from Das goldene evangelienbuch Heinrichs III, a facsimile of the Golden Gospels of Henry III. This facsimile was made in Germany in the 1933. Henry III (1017-1056) was a scion of the Ottonian dynasty, and, like his predecessors, was known for commissioning books with sumptuous decoration. In the detail below, you can see the fate of the rich man’s soul as it is pulled from his body (far left), carried  to Hades by a devil (middle), and as it stands and utters its request to Lazarus in the company of other tortured souls and of Satan.

Our collection houses a number of sermons that were designed to remind their hearers of the end that had been prepared for them. In the early third century Saint Hippolytus (170-235 CE) in which he described Hades thus:

"In this region there is a certain place set apart, as a lake of unquenchable fire. Whereinto we suppose no one hath hitherto been cast; but it is prepared for a day afore determined by God: in which one righteous sentence shall deservedly be passed upon all men."

On the left is the title page of the 1737 edition of the sermon edited by William Whitson. Whitson followed tradition in attributing this work to first-century Jewish historian Jospehus, though scholars now attribute it to St. Hippolytus.

Henry Greenwood preached a sermon on the grounds of St. Paul's cathedral on June 14, 1614. The sermon was titled Tormenting Tophet, or, a Terrible Description of Hell, Able to Breake the Hardest Heart, and Cause it Quake and Tremble and published in 1628. Greenwood uses the sermon to think through the nature of hell. In particular, he relentlessly questions the nature of hell-fire, whether it is allegorical or substantial (substantial, he avers); if substantial, then of what material (of a special sort that does not require wood); and whether this material is corporal or spiritual. “What is most probable,” he concludes, is “ that it is, and shall be, a corporal fire, with an extraordinary afflicting power given unto it, tormenting both soul and body….[T]his fire shall outwardly burn thy flesh, and a worm shall inwardly gnaw your conscience.”

The topography of hell will be familiar to readers of Dante’s Inferno. The engraving on the left comes from a three-volume Italian edition illustrated by Luigi Portirelli and published in 1804. Also among the many editions we have of this work is an early sixteenth-century edition that contains woodcuts by several artists. On each page, the copious commentary of Christoforo Landino overwhelms Dante's text. The image on the right contains text and commentary for the end of Canto XXXIII and the beginning of Canto XXXIV. "Look straight ahead and see if you can make him out," begins Hollander's translation of this last canto of Dante's journey.

Last but not least, our extensive Comics Collection weighs in on the nature of hell. Gary Panter’s  Jimbo’s Inferno, published in 2006, superimposes the landscape of the Inferno onto a contemporary shopping mall. The result is, according to the subtitle, “A Ridiculous Mis-recounting of Dante Alighieri’s Immortal Inferno in which Jimbo, Led by Valise, in Pursuit of the Soulpinx, enters Focky Bocky, Vast Gloomrock Mallscape."

If Jimbo's Inferno brings hell up to date with some of the more banal features of contemporary American culture, Lucifer (for mature audiences only), reinvents hell as a steamy piano bar in Los Angeles. Lucifer was created by Mike Carey, Peter Gross and Ryan Kelly and published in 2001.

150 years ago today, on July 9, 1762, Catherine the Great began her thirty-four year reign over Russia.  Following the assassination of her husband, Peter III, Catherine assumed the throne and presided over what became known as both the Golden Age of the Russian Empire and the age of the Russian Enlightenment.

Catherine was born in Stettin, Prussia (now Poland) on May 2, 1729.  Her name at birth was Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg.  When she married Peter III, she converted to the Russian Orthodox faith and changed her name to Ekaterina, the Russian equivalent of Catherine.  She gave birth to four children and all were most likely illegitimate, although Peter III claimed the firstborn son, Paul, as his heir.  Most likely, Paul was actually the son of one of Catherine's lovers, Sergei Saltykov.  Catherine never remarried, but instead maintained a string of lovers up until her death at the age of sixty-seven.

 
Special Collections at Ellis Library possesses a charter signed by Catherine the Great's hand that promotes Aleksandr Mukhanov, a young Russian nobleman, from regimental baggage-train driver to Lieutenant-Captain (Secund-Rotmistr) in the Horse-Mounted Guards.  The charter was produced in 1790 and is extremely ornate.  If you would like to stop by and see the charter in person, we would be happy to bring it out for you during our normal operating hours.