Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Ancestors Trans-Continental Travel (not by Airplane)

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

 It's Saturday Night again -

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings:

1)  Each week, The Weekly Genealogist (published by NEHGS) asks a survey question, and readers respond to the question, usually just selecting one of the answer options, and sometimes with paragraphs of information.  Reader Janice Sellers suggested using this week's question.

2)  On 24 July, the question was:  Have you or any of your ancestors traveled across the United States by car, train, wagon, or some other form of transportation that was not an airplane? (You can decide what constitutes a cross-country trip but since the distance from the east coast to the west coast ranges from 2,500 to 3,500 miles, depending on the route, we suggest it should be at least 1,500 miles. Canadian cross-country trips also count.)

3)  Answer the question above in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.

My answers:

I’m currently on one of the cross-country trips right now, having traveled from Martinez to Los Angeles, then to Kansas City by Amtrak. We have in the past traveled to New York, to Florida, and across Canada by train.

When I was in college in the 70s, I traveled via Greyhound across the United States and Canada twice with two different girlfriends, Carol and Beth. Greyhound had special monthly passes that let us travel anywhere we wanted. We’d tour a town/city during the day and use the bus as our motel at night traveling to another town. We did have friends and family to visit, too, so we could take showers!

Living in the California, all of our ancestors have made the travel west from the mid-west or south. My mother’s southern family moved from state to state as they continued west, finally stopping in Texas. My father’s family came from either Ireland or Germany across the Atlantic and settled in the mid-West before heading west.

• My mother, Lela, and her parents, Tom Johnston and Pansy Lancaster, came from Texas by way of Idaho and Oregon, during World War II.

• My grandfather and grandmother, William Cyril Hork and Anna Marie Sullivan, came from Montana to Southern California after World War I.

• My great-grandparents, Johan Anton Hork and Julia Ann Sieert, came to Montana from Illinois in the 1890s.

• My great-grandparents, John Gleeson and Margaret Tierney, came first in 1880 to South Dakota from the area near Ottawa, Canada, then to Portland, Oregon in the early 1900s.

Copyright © 2019 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.