I love the stories and the history they were a living part of. I've been working on my fathers family just this last month or two. For several years I've concentrated on Moms better documented family. Annie Hutchinson and others that touched or influenced their lives have always facinated me. I go back to Dads family now and then. Just recently that line has opened up. I read about Nemah County Kansas in the years leading up to, through, and following the Civil War. Quantrel's Raiders, Capt John Graham that Graham County was named for and my family arriving in the middle of all that. Good times and bad. Drought, and famine. It was so bad more than 60 families in that small rural population wouldn't have gotten through without food and money help that was sent to them. Then grasshoppers so bad that the three years were memorable enough to name a tiny town, "Grasshopper". And my great grandparents grew up in that place. The Jacobites in Scotland, land clearances, and Ireland's Potato Famine. "We've" come from good times and bad times in good places and bad places. They were the rich, the poor, the educated and the uneducated. They were literally doctors, lawyers, butchers and chiefs. Getting an idea of their time and their story is more than the begotts in the Biblical sense. One little Kansas town was so tired of the heartbreak of babies dying, they legislated cleanliness, diet, education and medical care. I'd been reading the "died the day he was born, died at age seven months" et. and found just how tired of the pain of loss they really were. I also read of bumper crops of grain, fruit, gardens, cattle, sheep, chickens and goats. Then the families moved on, little towns returned to prairie with little left but old graves and the farms became large family holdings or co-ops. From the towns bypassed by the railroads, to towns by passed by interstates. Other towns grew beyond anything anyone could have imagined.
I'm hooked!
