The Block
In Chicago a block is a real thing rather than a figure of speech — block clubs, block parties, what block did you grow up on. It is also the unit this work keeps returning to in any city: a census enumerator walked a block, a fire insurance atlas drew one, a city directory listed one. And a block is how word gets round. What one household worked out, the next one heard about. New articles are posted here as the research and the records are worked out. Keep the address and come back for a visit.
On the records themselves — what burned, what did not, and how to reach the rest of it.
Before the plane ticket
16 OCTOBER 2026
If you are in your twenties and curious about where your family came from, you are in good company. Before the DNA kit and the plane ticket, there is a phone call to make.
The questions I didn't ask
13 OCTOBER 2026
If your grandparents are still here, the most valuable family research you will ever do costs nothing. These are the questions I wish I had asked mine.
The middle of the trip
8 OCTOBER 2026
A friend's trip to Northern Ireland sent me back to a 2018 drive from Munich to Lake Como, and to the Austrian town my grandfather wrote home from in May 1945.
What actually burned in 1871
5 SEPTEMBER 2026
The fire is the first thing anyone says about Chicago records, and it is the least useful thing they say. The useful question is narrower — which office held the record you want, and did that office stand inside the burnt district.
The address you are looking for is not the address it was
3 SEPTEMBER 2026
Chicago renumbered every street in 1909, corrected the job in 1911, and renamed several hundred streets besides. An address copied out of an 1890 census is not the address you would type into a map today, and the house it points to may…
The substitutes: where Chicago's answers actually live
1 SEPTEMBER 2026
When the record you want does not exist, some other office usually recorded the same fact for a reason of its own. Knowing which office, and why it cared, is the difference between a line that stops and a line that continues.
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