Hilltop family cemetery still in use Gusher, Jetstream or Waterfall? Preparation I appreciated group guidance recently about preparing for a genealogy trip. I am going to a marvelous Appalachian region where a half dozen of my ancestral families settled. Their times in the mountains were exciting to me as they were part of the westward push in the wake of the Revolutionary War. They included patriot warriors, some guarding local lead mines against loyalists, several in the militia warding off raiding Shawnees, and one who was a Continental survivor of the siege of Fort Laurens. So much to explore! Four of these families landed in Philadelphia in 1738, coming from Bavaria and Prussia. They spent some  time in Lancaster, where German was as common as English. Were they working off indentures for their  passage? Then the Great Road called, and they travelled down the Shenandoah to the New River Valley.  I had visited southwest Virginia before, finding archival treasures abou...

digital file from b&w film copy neg. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a09983 Our Lee and Rogers Civil War Heroines Many cultures have stories that honor and idolize both their known and unknown heroes/heroines. This story is about three women on my maternal side who kept my mother’s families alive during General Sherman’s intense military campaign in the USA state of Georgia, during the American Civil War.  These women were my known second great-grandmother and her sister-in-law and an identity-unknown heroine who was part of their lives. Caveat:   If you are sensitive to the subject of slavery and the culture of that time and feel the need to judge the current generation or not tell it the way it was, you may want to skip this article.  I am using a name in this article that has come down through two of my related families and am telling the story as it was told to me. Context is everything and I believe it is a crime to rewrite history. Allied Families Sometime after...

From  https://nutfieldgenealogy.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-massachusetts-ohio-connection.html The Pioneers can be summed up by the subtitle: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West.   Out here in Washington state, we think of "The West" as beginning with Lewis and Clark voyaging, mapping and collecting, the Louisiana Purchase, gold discovered at Sutter's Mill, and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. However, the idea of manifest destiny, that the new young United States would spread west was developing even during the Revolutionary War, and picked up steam after the War of 1812.   McCullough sets his tale near the beginning of this process, and weaves in many of the pioneering families from New England who saw the "American Ideal" as free, equalitarian and based on education for all. Because the US had allowed slavery in the new Constitution, the battle for freedom and equality was part of the work of settling this new country, although...