The Long Way to Our Winter Home
by Bonnie Cook
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The last few years my husband and I have be‐ come snowbirds to Arizona for up to 51⁄2 months of the winter. We miss the beauty of the new white snow, but not the shoveling. Also, our bodies limit the enjoyment of participating in the winter sports we used to do. The fall of 2011, we decided to take the long route to get to Arizona. Starting the first week in October, we took the northern route across the United States as far as New York. We passed thru Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C. (went to Arlington National Cemetery and saw the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknowns); West Virginia; North and South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; Pensacola, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; Oklahoma; Texas and New Mexico to get to our winter roost in Roosevelt, Arizona.
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Bonnie Cook
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All told, we got to visit all eight of our (combined) children, 17 grandchildren, 5 great‐ grandchildren, my mother, sister, several nieces and a nephew, my husband’s brother, 2 cousins and a handful of friends. Since 2011 was the 150thAnniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, we also stopped at 21 Civil War sites back east. Many of the sites had good to excellent visitor centers with films, various displays and guided tours of the battlefields. Each one had something unique to tell and show. All in all, you could not help but sense the strong feelings for the division of the North and South. Also, we saw the horrid ways the battles were fought as well as the masses of good men losing their lives because of the conditions out on the battlefields. The Confederate Prison at Andersonville was one of the most sobering. The poor living conditions, lack of food and just plain filth, including contaminated water, caused more deaths than the battles.
We made a genealogy stop in Mellette, South Dakota. It was and still is a very small farm town that my g‐g‐grandfather DALE settled in when he got land for serving in the Civil War. He had a hardware store and was the first Postmaster there. There was no museum or public library to look up any new information that may have been written about my ancestors. The current Postmaster at the Post Office did have a little pamphlet about the 1st Post Offices and Postmasters in Mellette. She had lived there all her life and a cousin of hers bought the old DALE house after my last ancestor, a g‐g‐aunt, passed away. He tore down the house and now lives in a trailer on that lot. It was fun to see and feel what the area was like.
The next stop was the cemetery. We had the information from the family headstones but didn't have a picture of them. (Find‐a‐Grave doesn't include this little cemetery yet!) The next little town to visit was the County seat in Redfield, South Dakota. The county clerk brought out all the old original land records for us. They made 13 copies of these and also 3 old land maps so we could find the land. We drove to a couple of places and realized the river had changed course a little since 1880's.
When we were in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we tried to find information about my father's LUKENS ancestors. This has been my "brick wall" family since 1970, when I first got into genealogy. The county seat is at Troy, Pennsylvania. We headed to the courthouse and the county clerk’s office first. There was no will or land records for the John Lukens I was checking out. All they had was an inventory of the household at the time of his death. There were several beds and lots of bedding ‐ must have been a fairly good-sized family at one time! Unfortunately, there were no names for his family. Next stop was the Mercer Museum. Besides being a wonderful museum of the area, it has a huge and very full genealogy research library. We spent most of one full day there and found a few articles about other LUKENS in Bucks, County but nothing about the family I needed. The librarians even went down in the basement to the "old" records to help us but no luck. It was still fun to be in the area of my ancestors and read about the lifestyles in that period, the churches, schools, etc.
So, as you can see ‐ sometimes you get something out of a research stop and sometimes you don't.
Published in the February 2013 KCGS Newsletter.
We made a genealogy stop in Mellette, South Dakota. It was and still is a very small farm town that my g‐g‐grandfather DALE settled in when he got land for serving in the Civil War. He had a hardware store and was the first Postmaster there. There was no museum or public library to look up any new information that may have been written about my ancestors. The current Postmaster at the Post Office did have a little pamphlet about the 1st Post Offices and Postmasters in Mellette. She had lived there all her life and a cousin of hers bought the old DALE house after my last ancestor, a g‐g‐aunt, passed away. He tore down the house and now lives in a trailer on that lot. It was fun to see and feel what the area was like.
The next stop was the cemetery. We had the information from the family headstones but didn't have a picture of them. (Find‐a‐Grave doesn't include this little cemetery yet!) The next little town to visit was the County seat in Redfield, South Dakota. The county clerk brought out all the old original land records for us. They made 13 copies of these and also 3 old land maps so we could find the land. We drove to a couple of places and realized the river had changed course a little since 1880's.
When we were in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we tried to find information about my father's LUKENS ancestors. This has been my "brick wall" family since 1970, when I first got into genealogy. The county seat is at Troy, Pennsylvania. We headed to the courthouse and the county clerk’s office first. There was no will or land records for the John Lukens I was checking out. All they had was an inventory of the household at the time of his death. There were several beds and lots of bedding ‐ must have been a fairly good-sized family at one time! Unfortunately, there were no names for his family. Next stop was the Mercer Museum. Besides being a wonderful museum of the area, it has a huge and very full genealogy research library. We spent most of one full day there and found a few articles about other LUKENS in Bucks, County but nothing about the family I needed. The librarians even went down in the basement to the "old" records to help us but no luck. It was still fun to be in the area of my ancestors and read about the lifestyles in that period, the churches, schools, etc.
So, as you can see ‐ sometimes you get something out of a research stop and sometimes you don't.
Published in the February 2013 KCGS Newsletter.
