Saturday Night Genealogy Fun–20 July 2013

Randy Seaver, of Genea-Musings, has a wonder fun activity on Saturday called Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. This week his mission for us is:

1)   Make a map using the National Atlas map at (http://nationalatlas.gov/streamer/Streamer/streamer.html) showing the downstream course of a river that one of your ancestors may have traveled on.  What does it tell you?  What did you learn?  Did they live at other places on that river, or downstream of that river? 
2)   Tell us about it in a blog post of your own (please show us the map you created - use an image snipping tool or take a screen shot), or make a comment here on this post, or write a Facebook status or a Google+ stream post.

My husband’s ancestor, Amos Gorrell, kept diaries and described their trip from Chillicothe, Ohio to their new home in Tipton, Missouri in 1866. Here is Chillicothe in Ross County, Ohio. Even though it is near the Scioto River, Amos and his wife, Catherine, traveled to Waverly by wagon.

At Waverly, they boarded a boat to travel to Portsmouth down the Ohio & Erie Canal. These maps don’t seem to show the canals, but from the photos I’ve seen, they were built near rivers.

At Portsmouth the trip continued down the Ohio River to Cincinnati. They could not get another boat to St. Louis so traveled instead by train on the Cincinnati & St. Louis Railroad. They did have to take a ferry across the Mississippi River to St. Louis. They continued their trip to Tipton aboard the Pacific Railroad.

Now what we need is a map system like this that has the many railroads on it!