Looking at a land patent

I’m doing a little researching around today to try to fill in some of the holes in my database from the 19th and early 20th centuries.  One of the resources that I purchased at the FGS conference recently was Family Maps of Montgomery County, Indiana.  I bought the book with the intention of looking up some of the original documents that were referenced within it.  Today, I finally looked up the records listed there in my direct line.

A little more from Thursday at FGS

Well, hanging out with other Geneabloggers is certainly much more entertaining than sitting around in my hotel room writing the next post.  I said there would be more from Thursday, so here is a bit more before I head out again to attend FGS today.  Also there’s a time-sensitive promo code in this post…

Wordless Wednesday - research trip teaser

I made a quick genealogy research trip over the weekend.  I'm still working through the data, but here's a teaser of one location I visited...

Surname Saturday: Beach

Okay, time to alternate back to one of the lines on my side of the family.  This week, we will look at one of the most heavily researched lines in my family.  It connects back to some of the earliest settlers of Massachusetts Colony and continues all the way to close family members who are still living today.  There are quite a few researchers looking into this line from the early-1800s back to the 1600s, possibly due to the line's connection to Sir Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill), so this will be a fairly long post with nine generations listed, but there seems to be one universal stumbling block when we go back far enough.

Surname Saturday update: Allen

After I wrote about my Allen connections last week, I decided to do a quick lookup on FamilySearch Pilot to see what I could find for Elva Allen.  I should have done this some time ago as one of the first records that was returned was a page from the 1870 U.S. census covering Sugar Creek Township, Montgomery County, Indiana.

Surname Saturday: Allen

So today I'm going to start an overview of each of the surnames that I'm researching, looking at each surname one at a time.  I'll start with the names in my own lines first, going in alphabetical order.  That means that today we'll look at how the Allen surname connects into my research.

Another location named for my ancestors

The Meharry family line, of which I am descended from Alexander "Red" Meharry III (1763-1813), left their mark in a few place names in western Indiana.  I've known about the Meharry Cemetery in Wingate, Indiana, where many of this family is buried, for a while now.  Since I'm actively researching this family, I've been looking around recently at other history references that deal with this part of the state.  Here's a fun tidbit from the History of Montgomery County (published in 1881) about another place that carries the family name:

Meharry Grove
If there is one spot in Montgomery county more celebrated than another (and there certainly is), that spot is Meharry Grove.  Located on Coal creek, one and a half miles north of Pleasant Hill, a high and beautifully shaded place, it has been the favorite campground for over thirty years.  The grounds contain about forty acres, a large number of seats are provided, and water is plentiful.  Here it has not been an uncommon occurrence for thousands of happy faces to congregate.  The eminent divines, Cyrus Nutt, Pres. Berry, Bishop Bowman, Dr. Brenton, have preached to immense audiences.  Here was held a mammoth temperance rally about 1875, addressed by the "Broad Ax," or M. D. Chance.  Here too, have ex-Gov. Col. Robert Hawley, of Centennial fame, Gov. S. M. Cullom, of Illinois, Hon. G. S. Orth, Judge T. F. Davidson, and other renowned statesmen, proclaimed American principles to vast concourses of people.  In all these gatherings the prevailing characteristic has been good order and universal enjoyment.

Satellite view of Coal Creek in western Montgomery County, Indiana, a little north of Wingate. View Larger Map

There's a 1916 obituary for Charles W. Meharry published in the Crawfordsville Review that mentions the "widely known Meharry family of Western Indiana" held a number of annual family reunions at Meharry's Grove, placing it on the border between Montgomery and Fountain Counties, which would place it on the western edge of Montgomery County.  But, I have yet to find a map that shows this location more precisely.  Looking at current satellite images of the area, there are a few areas surrounding Coal Creek that look like they have not been farmed.  I suspect that Meharry Grove was a parcel of farm land that was once owned by the family, and that Meharry Grove was an unofficial name for the farm.  But again, I don't have any proof of this yet.

He was a census enumerator

If you've listened to Genealogy Gems Podcast episode number 70, you've heard a little about my successes with searching in the 1930 US census this month.  The images of the census enumeration pages were made available for free for this month only at Footnote.com, so I figured I had nothing to lose except the time I used in searching for them.  I was looking at the page listing my great great grandfather, Jonathan Rice when I made this discovery.  By 1930, Jonathan was 73 years old and living alone in Linden, Indiana.  When I went to build the citation information to include in my database, the enumerator's signature (pictured) caught my eye.  A quick search of my database showed Everett Josiah Beach was my great granduncle.  Everett's brother Emerson married Jonathan's daughter Grace Rice to connect the two families on 17 Nov 1904.  So, knowing that Everett was in one of the families that I was researching, and knowing that he was an enumerator for the 1930 census, he must have been enumerated himself, right?  Almost -- I fell victim to one of my biggest frustrations with research done by computer.

My first search for him by name turned up no hits.  I set this task aside for a moment while I continued searching for other family members, but then thought of another way to search.  I tried expanding my search of the census index by removing the first name field from my search criteria, but adding "Indiana" to the state field in my search.  This gave me a list of 515 names on 183 census images to examine.  While I could look at each of these in turn, I didn't relish the thought of scrutinizing that many pages to find this one relative.  The next search criterion is the one that got me there.  I added "Montgomery" in the county field, which narrowed the search to 14 names on 2 census images.  The first image showed Emerson's household, while the second showed the household of "Eanstt J. Beach."  I thought that spelling was a little odd, and looking at the image, it was actually Everett's household, and he signed the sheet as enumerator as I had guessed he would.  The problem was that whoever read the page to create the index that Footnote was using misinterpreted Everett's handwriting and typed Eanstt instead.

The thing is, if I hadn't expanded and then narrowed my search on a different set of criteria, I wouldn't have found the indexing error.  That's what I dislike most about computerized indexes; they are exact to a fault in that if it's misspelled in the index, you've got to know the exact misspelling to find it.  Yes, I sent a note to the staff at Footnote to let them know of the error, and they did send me a note thanking me for the correction and soon had the entry updated to reflect Everett's name correctly.