52 Locations
My genealogy research can best be described as “an embarrassment of riches.” I have traced all my family lines back to pre-Revolutionary America, in 11 of the 13 original colonies (only Delaware and Georgia failed to make the cut). I have written and published a dozen family histories, and I still struggle to make sense of it all.
As I have researched over the past 10 years or so, I have constantly looked for new and creative ways to organize my research process and results. One approach that I have been reading about for a couple of years is to write one blog post a week focusing on a specific aspect of a family tree, so that at the end of a year you have an organized volume of work that answers important questions about your ancestors. Some people have picked an ancestor a week; others have selected people from specific parts of the country, or specific family lines. None of these caught my attention so I continued to look around.
While I was looking around, I began a new project – I called it Over the Hill, and it focused on the generation of my ancestors who moved from the colonies on the east coast to the interior states during the 50 years after the American Revolution. The focus was generally on my 3rd great-grandparents’ generation. As I began to try to make sense of where and why these people moved, I found myself trying to understand the locations they came from.
I realized that I couldn’t understand their movement until I understood both their origins and their destinations; that realization gave me the idea of writing about 52 locations that were significant in my family history.
I began to make a list of the counties that were important to my family and came up with 52 without having to stretch too much. These counties were either in the colonies where my ancestors settled as immigrants – Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina – or in the states where their travels took them after the Revolution – Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Arizona.
Each of the chapters in this book focused on one of the counties, and for each county I tried to do at least five things:
Set the county in space and time. Where is it and when was it settled?
Explore the evolution of the county’s boundaries. How did its boundaries change over time and what challenges does this pose to someone trying to research people who lived in the county?
Describe the county as it existed when my ancestors lived there. How did the people live? What were its resources and economic base? How was it impacted by larger events – what national or world issues influenced population changes in the county? What impact did those larger events had on the way of life of the people who lived in the county?
Identify my ancestors whose families lived in these counties. Which ones lived there at the same time, and were they geographically close to each other? Did they live in the same towns or attend the same churches? What were their lives like?
And throughout, try to figure out why they moved. What drew them toward one location or drove them away? I have learned that, in general, families are “movers” or “stayers.” That is, having moved once, a family is more likely to move a second and third time. My ancestors are clearly “movers;” although some branches of the family remained in the same location for an extended period, by and large they eventually moved on. To illustrate this point, I made the graphic that appears at the top of this post. (NOTE: I used Excel to make this chart. It took me a long time. In the process, I learned all kinds of things about how to use Excel.)
I arbitrarily decided that I would finish each county on the Friday of its designated week – not for any particular reason, but Friday it was.
As I wrote these essays, I used information from primary sources as I was able to find it. But I also included anecdotes and information that I found in secondary sources. As I wrote, I pointed out information that was speculative or fell more in the category of “family lore” and collective community memory. I wanted to go beyond the facts that I could prove about my ancestors in these locations. I wanted to frame their stories, and that sometimes involved what I call “creative nonfiction” – stories about what could have happened, or what later generations said had happened. I also wanted to capture what I knew – or thought I knew – at the time I wrote this. I fully expect that later information will disprove some of what I’ve speculated about, but I also hope that later information will prove some of the details I’m not so sure about.
I’m planning to include information from this book in my upcoming Thursday genealogy blog posts.