My Trails into the Past

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 ...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: It's Saturday Night again - time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Randy Seaver of Genea-Musing has another assignment for us. Here is our assignment: 1)   Which of your ancestors had an unusual occupation?   2)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment on this blog, or in a Facebook post.   I’m getting a late start, but here it is: Most of my ancestors and their collateral relatives had regular, not so unusual, jobs. They were farmers, carpenters, tailors, mechanics, housekeepers, teachers, secretaries, and ministers. However, I do have an great-grandaunt, Coreta Hutson Speed (my maternal great-grandmother's sister), who ran for Tax Collector in Comanche County, Texas in 1928 and won. It started out a sad story. Coreta’s husband, Bert Weaver Speed, was the Tax Collector until he ran for County Superintendent of Schools in 1924. He had to resign shortly afterwards due to illness, an...