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 ...

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 ...

Do you always get all the clues from a document the first time you view it? Or do you just record the main information and move on to the next document in a broad search? I admit that I have done that. I might locate a document that gives me the answer to my research question, such as the date of a marriage or the place of residence from a census. I would record that information in my genealogy database. I may not always read the whole document carefully or transcribed it completely. Those were my baby genealogy days. I try hard not to do that anymore. I spend time with the document, recording the full citation right then as I have the document on the website and can get the full URL and other details I need. I then read the entire document, and either fully transcribe it or take careful notes about all the important information. I’ll look at neighboring documents, or if a census, neighboring entries, and make note of them. But what about those documents I have collected years ag...

Father Albert Hork, my great-grandfather’s brother, was a Roman Catholic priest. He was assigned to many parishes in Nebraska, Arkansas, and Oregon. He served in Nebraska between 1888 and 1904, when the communities were small and the areas just being settled. He tended to serve those communities with German immigrant settlers. Learning about his service from diocese records only gave the facts of locations where he served and dates of those services. Newspaper articles tended to fill in the rest of what I know. Sometimes he served as the parish priest of one church and the roving priest for neighboring church whose parish were not large enough to support a full-time priest. He was assigned as the first full-time priest at Frances Church in Randolph, Nebraska. Before his arrival, visiting priest served the parish on an irregular basis. They might say a mass once a month, baptize any children born since the last visit, and then come back again in a month. The first priest who did tha...

This month, I am working with my Tierney family, who are of Carleton County, Ontario, specifically Nepean, which is now part of the Municipality of Ottawa. John Tierney and Ann Murray had a large family of eleven known children. The youngest, Mary Martha (1857-1950) entered the Sisters of Charity (Grey Nuns of Ottawa) at the young age of 16 years, 5 months on 24 December 1874. Three years later, she made her profession on 13 December 1877. [1] She was known as Sister St. Melanie. I have written about her before: Spirit – Mary Martha Tierney & her Spiritual Connection to God as Sister St. Melanie . After reading Sunny Jane Morton’s book, Searching for Sisters: A Guide to Researching Catholic Nuns in the United States (Genealogical Publishing, 2026), I have not been able to put her out of my mind. My cousin was named after her, and I took Melanie as my confirmation name. So, I feel a connection to her. I have a photograph of her as well as a couple of obituaries, which can he...