The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program is a national program conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police as a means to obtain consistent crime data across jurisdictions. Quarterly and year end reports provide an overview of the Tactical Review and Evaluation Division’s review and analysis of use of force and firearm pointing incidents. Tactical Review and Evaluation Division Reports Summary data on murders that occurred in Chicago by district, type of location, clearance, day month and time, motive, method, victim, and offender variables.Ĭontains a quarterly report for March, June, and September 2014.Ĭontains summary data regarding use of force for each year. Feel free to contact the Genealogy and Local History department for suggestions, tips, and assistance in your research.Summary data on numerous topics including index, violent and property crime case clearances murder firearms arrests city of Chicago population domestic violence traffic safety juveniles hate crimes personnel and calls for service. Land maps are another important and often-overlooked source, as they detail property ownership.Īs you can see, many options for researching your pre-fire Chicago families do exist. Newberry, all provide particulars of city life, including names and descriptions of other city residents. Wing diaries, and the letters of Walter L. Manuscript collections, such as the Thomas Butler Carter papers, the John M. For example, you might find a relative who graduated from Chicago Medical College (now Northwestern University’s School of Medicine) or who performed at Crosby’s Opera House in a recital. Pre-fire graduation programs for many schools and colleges have survived, as have programs for various arts and cultural events. and the United Nation of Chippewa, Ottawa, and Potawatamie Indians lists early settlers of Chicago, while an Illinois and Michigan Canal broadside details purchasers of lots offered for public sale in Chicago. For instance, an 1833 treaty between the U.S. Furthermore, a census record can give you the same information for all the people in a household, so you can discover a lot about a particular family in those key pre-fire years of 1850, 1860, and 1870.Īrchival sources pertaining to early Chicago and Chicagoans often name early residents of the city, making these invaluable sources as well. Finding a relative in the census can give you their name, age, occupation, marital status, citizenship status, and place of birth. Census records can be useful, and they are available for the Chicago area every 10 years from 1820 through 1930, excepting 1890. Mary’s, and First Presbyterian, to name just a few. Many church records still exist as well, including First Immanuel Lutheran, Old St. This database allows keyword searching by name or address, always helpful when you are searching for a particular family.Ĭity directories provide an alphabetical list of heads of households, and pre-fire Chicago directories for 1839, 1844, 1846, and 1853-1871 have survived. The Proquest digitized version of the Chicago Tribune is complete from 1849 through 1992. Sam Fink used the newspapers’ reports to create an index to pre-fire deaths and marriages in Chicago, thus creating a substitute for some of the lost courthouse records. For instance, Chicago newspapers are one of the most extant sources, with issues of multiple newspapers dating from 1838 to 1871 available to researchers. While it is the case that many valuable records were lost, there are also many other often-overlooked records that survived, either because the originals were never in the fire’s path to begin with or because copies of originals had fortuitously been placed out of harm’s way. This loss has led to the myth that “everything went up in flames,” and that searching pre-1871 Chicago is hopeless. The fire destroyed the county courthouse and almost all of its records, including many of the typical ones genealogists rely on: civil registrations, vital records, deeds, and so on. For family historians searching in Chicago, the Great Fire of 1871 still causes problems.
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