(Editor’s Note: The subject of this article, Michael Gagnon, graduated from Hall County schools, then went to Gainesville Junior College before graduating from Georgetown University, then took a M.A. and Ph. D. degree from Emory University. His academic interests include the industrialization history, the early American republic and Southern history.—eeb)
By Edward Foster | Michael Gagnon, an associate professor of history at Georgia Gwinnett College who lives in Sugar Hill, has produced a series of web pages that should interest anyone who wants to explore their own family history, the local history of Gwinnett County, the history of Georgia, or the history of the US in the 1800s.
Gagnon
Dr. Gagnon created his website after attending an Emory University workshop on using the web for teaching and research. Originally he collected links and created web pages to help his students in classes, but decided to launch the site privately in order to open it up to public access as well.
One page on Gagnon’s website contains links to all the online files of the manuscript census for Georgia, from 1820 to 1930. While the files are located on the Internet Archive (archive.org) website, Gagnon organized the links so the files are easy to locate and download. These manuscript census files contain the information collected by census marshals directly from the people.
While early census records collected minimal information, starting in 1850, the records give detailed information about every member of a household, and separated the enslaved people of the household into a detailed list that revealed information about their lives as well. Starting in 1870, these records tell increasing amounts of information about all inhabitants. The microfilm, from which the files were digitized, is organized by counties within each state.
A second page on Gagnon’s site extracted Gwinnett County’s manuscripts from the state files for each census from 1830 to 1860. That makes them smaller and easier to use, if you are interested in Gwinnett. He plans to expand this coverage in the future, and to assign student projects using these files.
A third page collects county level information about Georgia from U.S. Census reports on population, housing, business, industry, and agriculture, from 1900 to 2010. Professor Gagnon used the information from this collection to analyze and present basic demographic information about Gwinnett County during Button Gwinnett Day at Georgia Gwinnett College in 2012, and he plans to expand this collection as time allows.
- All these pages can be accessed through: http://earlyushistory.net/census-documents/
A fourth page contains links to free access to many 19th century newspapers, particularly national newspapers in the early republic. Connecting to this page are links to Internet Archive files, again organized for convenience of use. These links are to files for complete runs of Niles Register, American Farmer, American Annual Register, Hunts Merchants Magazine, and DeBow’s Review. Other links connect users to digital databases, like the Georgia Historical Newspaper collection at the Digital Library of Georgia. Finally, some “for pay” databases are included in the links. From these newspapers, one can read history as it happened, from one of the participants, to get their interpretation of what was occurring around them.
- The newspaper page is: http://earlyushistory.net/newspapers/
Finally, Dr. Gagnon is also posting all the information he has located on his current research project, a biography of Augustin Clayton, for whom Clayton County, and Clayton Street in Lawrenceville, are named. One can learn firsthand about Georgia’s attitudes toward the Cherokee in Georgia, about Andrew Jackson’s war on the Bank of the United States, on the presidential election of 1832, on Georgia’s support of South Carolina against the United States in the Nullification Crisis, and on the rise of a new political party in Georgia in response to opposition to Andrew Jackson.
- The Clayton page is: http://earlyushistory.net/clayton-documents/
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