My Trails into the Past

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...

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 ...

Amos Gorrell, Senior, was born perhaps on 7 August 1804 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. [1] He married Leah Wollam on 24 May 1827 in Columbiana County, Ohio by William Reed. [2] Columbiana County is just west of Beaver County. He died 14 September 1890 in Ross County, Ohio. [3] The questions to answer in this session are: When did he purchase real estate? When did he move to Ohio? I’ll be looking at census, tax, and deed records, and searching in full-text search. 1830s Amos did not appear in the 1830 census, even though he was married with a wife. Likely, he lived with a parent. Four Gorrell households were enumerated in 1830 Beaver County. Samuel Gorrell had one male age 30 to 39 and one female aged 40 to 49 with one male under 5. [4] James Gorrell had one male 40 to 49 and a male 15-19. [5] Sarah Gorrell had one male 15 to 19, and 20 to 29, one female 15 to 19, 20 to 29, and 50 to 59. [6] And on the previous page: Joseph Gorrell had one male 20 to 29, 3 males under 5, and ...