Having gone down the rabbit hole that is ancestry.com over the last year I have accumulated a mountain of information about those that came before me. This is where all that information will be shared.
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They Shared Birthdays but Not Much Else
July 9th is the birthday of two of my great grandmothers. On my father’s side, Margaret Evelyn Thompson Myers Hounihan, mother of Dad’s mom, was born 9 July 1903 in Roodhouse, Illinois and on my mother’s side, the mother of my maternal grandmother, Bessie Hendricks Radcliff, was also born on July 9th but seven years…
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Oak Grove
The house my grandparents bought in 1961, the same house my father lives in today, was once part of a small town called Oak Grove. Built on the highest point in McLean County, a ridge overlooking current day Carlock, Oak Grove became a bustling center of commerce at a time when transportation was literally bogged…
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Murdering Cousins
In 1797, Thomas Starr was hanged in Haddam Connecticut for the murder of his nephew, Samuel Cornwell. That was a surprising sentence I found today in, of all things, a research paper titled “THE STARR FAMILY OF MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT; A STUDY IN SOCIAL MOBILITY AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE” by John Barry. It’s an interesting read, talking…