Cook County

Immigration/Naturalization

VOLUNTEER INDEXING PROJECT  

What does a Swedish survivor from the steerage section of the Titanic have to do with records in the Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County Archives? August Wennerstrom represents one 1912 Naturalization record found during data entry to create an Index of these records for the Clerk's Archive.   

The Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County Archives is managing a significant Indexing and Preservation project, funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).  The Archives is home to more than 500,000 naturalization records covering the years 1906 to 1929. More than 400,000 of these records are Declarations of Intention, which were the first papers to be filed by those who wished to become U.S. citizens. Currently, though, it is difficult to locate individual Declaration entries for researchers coming to the Archives.   

To address this problem and to assist our users of Archive records, the Project will create an Index of the Declarations of Intention.  

Volunteers have been recruited from throughout Cook County for this work and as of this month they have indexed over 100,000 records.  For individuals interested in Archive or Indexing experience, our project offers that opportunity. The Volunteer task is to enter data from the original Declarations of Intention books into 12 database fields. The Declaration forms were originally handwritten by clerks and a challenge for volunteers is to decipher turn-of-the-century handwriting.  The actual indexing takes place downtown at the Richard J. Daley Center. In general, volunteers will index in three-hour shifts at least once a week during the project, although we try to accommodate individual schedules. Hours for indexing are Monday - Friday, 8:30 - 4:00.  Interested parties should contact Phil Costello at 312-603-6601 or Jeanie Child at 312-603-6628.  As for Mr. Wennerstrom, we found through further research that after arriving in New York aboard the Carpathia, he traveled to Chicago, where he filed a Declaration of Intention through the Circuit Court of Cook County. At the Salvation Army in Chicago, he met his future wife and they moved together to Culver, IN, where he became a gardener and later superintendent of buildings and grounds at Culver Military Academy. They had seven children.

Lorene Kennard [info@walnutavenueresearch.com], "[Sla-ilinfo] VOLUNTEER INDEXING PROJECT at The Clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County Archives," SLA-ILinfo, discussion list, 10 Jun 2008, (https://mail.prairienet.org/pipermail/sla-ilinfo/ 

 

Steve Morse has created a One-Step search for the Cook County, Illinois, vital records that are online at http://www.cookcountygenealogy.com . They include birth certificates that are seventy-five years old or older (before today's date in 1933); marriage certificates that are fifty years old or older (before today's date in 1958); and death certificates that are twenty years old or older (before today's date in 1988).

At http://www.stevemorse.org , place the cursor over "Vital Records" on the upper left side of the page and click on "Chicago Vital Records." Steve's One-Step eliminates the need to compute the Soundex code and also makes it easy to find the name of a spouse.