Ellen, Thanks for your info. I'm not complaining about the site's wonderful results, but commenting. Dave Witthans =================================== Check the results carefully, because the data may not always be correct. I checked for one Ancestor's name and received one hit. Probable errors: The spelling of the names in the Case Description left off one letter, "c", which was in the Details. It was supposed to have taken place in 1904, but the Details said it was related to prohibition. Was there more than one prohibition in Chicago? Question: Shouldn't the name of the spouse of the victim be given, especially the husband's name? And perhaps the name of the defendant's spouse be given? ===================================== Case Description Pollak, Mrs. Rose, shot dead, 703 Throop St., by her brother-in-law, John Pollak, who immediately committed suicide by shooting. 22d Prect. Case Number 1925 Circumstances Date of offense January 3, 1904 Date of death January 3, 1904 Time between offense and death Immediate - death occurred at the crime scene Address 703 Throop st. Type of location Residence Type of residence Residence (Don't know whose) Type of death Homicide Type of homicide Intentional murder Method of killing Other gun, gun unspecified Weapon shot dead Murder/suicide? Yes Circumstances description Family quarrel Total number of victims 1 Related to Prohibition? Yes Victim Name Pollack, Rose Gender Female Race White Ethnicity Other, european Victim/defendant relationship Other family relationship Related by blood or marriage Other-in-law relationship Defendant Name Pollack, John Gender Male Race White Ethnicity Other, european Defendant/victim relationship Family (include in laws, multi-generations, step relations) Related by blood or marriage Other-in-law relationship Police Precinct 22 Total number of defendants arrested 1 Defendant ID'd at scene Defendant identified by someone else at scene Allegations of police corruption No Legal Charges against defendant No charges recorded Type of legal decision recorded None Allegations of police corruption No ===================================== ----- Original Message ----- From: Ellen Plourde To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, September 02, 2005 3:09 PM Subject: [IL-CHICAGO] Homicides IN Chicago http://homicide.northwestern.edu/ A FASCINATING site: some people at Northwestern took the Homicide Index from IRAD and did some stories. Maybe you can find someone you're related to? An excerpt from the home page: The years between 1870 and 1930 marked the emergence of Chicago as a dominant American city, undergoing some of the most dramatic and extensive social, political and economic changes in our national history. Against this backdrop we present a unique record - the Chicago Police Department Homicide Record Index - chronicling 11,000 homicides in the city during those years. Leigh Bienen, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Northwestern University and the Director of the Chicago Historical Homicide Project, and her colleagues created both a sequential text file and a quantitative database from these handwritten records. The first academic publications from this work are published in Northwestern University School of Law's Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 92, No.s 3/4. For our academic audience we provide this research, and both the case summaries and the coded quantitative database for your use and further research. For the public, we invite you not only to interact with this searchable database, but also to explore some of the more fascinating aspects of the 25 cases highlighted here; and to explore the historical context - with emphasis on the rule of law - of these crimes and cases. Ellen Plourde http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~opindex/