My Trails into the Past

I have been working with tax records in Beaver County for my husband’s Gorrell family. The tax records for the family range from 1804 through 1840 across two or three different townships. Some years there are one or two entries, other years three or four. I recorded the entries by year and included the census entries from 1800 to 1840. These are census records with only the head of household and tick marks for the other members by age and sex. I also included some of my own comments and source citations. I ended up with 9 pages. The work I’m doing is to find the family of Amos Gorrell (1804-1890). Here is an example of what I created: 1800 South Beaver Township census . The only townships at this time were First Moon, Hanover, North Beaver, Second Moon, Sewickley, and South Beaver. The Gorrells were enumerated in South Beaver Township. Two men were enumerated next to each other. One James is older than the other, also indicated by the senior and junior appendages to their name. It ...

When I last wrote the post about platting Amos Gorrell’s land using DeedMapper (see link ), I had found the piece he bought and then how he sold the land in three pieces. They fit together nicely. We learned in the Metes and Bounds class how to place a USGS map into DeedMapper and then plat the land onto the map. I first went to the GIS webpage for Beaver County to see if I could figure out how the land might fit on a current map. I knew that a boundary for each of the three pieces was on New Lisbon Road, and that his land straddled South Beaver and Ohio Townships. I used that to orientate the land. I also knew, they were not far from the Ohio border. I showed that portion of the map in the previous post. The next step was to obtain the correct topo map for the area. It turned out that the portion of the west part of Beaver County was on the East Liverpool North Quadrangle that showed Ohio and portions of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. I pulled the 7.5 Minute Series map into D...

Outside activities included a week at GRIP in Pittsburgh, the flight home, and train club show over the weekend. Genealogy Genealogy Volunteer/Work:  None this week. Genealogy Meetings:  None this week. Genealogy Writing/Research : I did work on Amos Gorrell, Sr. this week, writing the 52 Ancestors post and creating another about the platting I did in class at GRIP. Blog Posts Published: Trying to Understand a Tax Record in Beaver County, Pennsylvania For the theme of “A Source I Want to Understand Better,” I wrote about the tax records from Beaver County and how I found the law that explains them. Highlighted by Linda Stufflebean and 52 Ancestors. Land Platting Amos Gorrell’s Beaver County, Pennsylvania Land (12 for ’26) I wrote about the deeds I platted in Deedmapper concerning Amos’s land. SNGF: Your Farthest Flung Ancestor We had to figure out the ancestors that came from the farthest. Courses Attended :  Metes & Bounds: Land Platting at GRIP ...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings is to: 1) Our family trees contain historical persons who came from places all over the world.  Each of our ancestral lines came from somewhere. 2)  Can you identify your Farthest-Flung Ancestor (FFA)?  Who in your ancestral tree came from the most geographically distant place from where you live now? What brought them (or their descendants) to where your family ended up? Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for this idea. Here's mine: My farthest-flung ancestors are Vincent Sievert and his wife, Susannah Raduntz , who were from Posen, in present-day Poland. They were ethnic Germans who came to the US in 1852 and settled in Joliet, Will County, Illinois. The distance from Schneidemühl to my home in Martinez, California, is 9,215 kilometers (5,726 miles). My husband’s farthest-flung ancestor, Ludwig Wilhelm Wollenweber ,...

This week, I’m taking the Land Platting class at GRIP (Genealogy Research Institute of Pittsburgh) now run by NGS. This course is taught by Jerry Smith, Kimberly Powell, and Sydney Cruice. We have learned lots of skills, platting, placing our plats on topo maps, and solving problems. In my spare time, I have platted the four deeds concerning Amos’ land in Ohio township. The first piece of land was described as follows: On 13 September 1836, Amos purchased 124 acres of land situated in South Beaver and Ohio Townships with a mortgage of $496 from the Famers and Mechanics Bank, land described as: “Beginning at the southwest corner at a post, thence by land of said Bank N89E 159 perches, 5/10 to a post, thence by land of William Shearer, N148 perches to a post, thence by land in the possession of Jacob Todd S80W 165 perches to a white oak grubb, thence by land in possession of same, S1W 116 perches to the place of beginning, containing 124 acres and allowance (being part of a larger ...

The tax records I have found for my husband’s Gorrell family have been a godsend. These are yearly records organized by township and boroughs that have helped me place his ancestors in time and place, and discover a possible generation further back than I knew. Here is one entry from 1804 that I’m trying to understand. There are no headings for the numbers, though the taxable items are labeled. The Gorrell men are marked with the yellow highlighter. This tax list even gives me a sense of how the name was pronounced back then. It didn’t have the strong first syllable accent that our family uses. These images were from the Beaver County Genealogy and History Center in Beaver, Pennsylvania. I had a volunteer there scan the pages from two different townships and one borough that listed Gorrell men in various spellings. They did not have the originals, but rather photocopies that were bound together by township and borough. I remembered seeing them when I visited in 2018 but I wasn’t ...

Outside activities included phenology, History Center, lunch with friends, and an airplane ride to Pittsburgh for GRIP. Genealogy Genealogy Volunteer/Work: I volunteered at the History Center, working on accessions by entering them into PastPerfect. I moved the CalTrans collection to the back hall shelves and the new books from the Board of Supervisors to the County room. I also entered some books into the library database. I sent out the BCG press release.   The Writer’s group met this week and we discussed Jacqueline and Margaret’s writing samples, as well as a chance to meet in person when Jacqueline comes down to visit in September. Genealogy Meetings:  Jacqueline and I met and discussed our trip to Pittsburgh. Genealogy Writing/Research : I worked on Amos (1804-1890), who lived in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. It was a bit of a struggle getting all the deeds recorded and working out the tax records in two different townships. Blog Posts Published: Mam-ma’...