I've been trying to play some serious catch-up recently in my genealogy research, so one of my tasks has been to finally incorporate details from a specific page of the 1860 US federal census into my online family tree for my 2nd great grandfather, Christian, and his Eggenberger branch. While information on censuses is usually fairly straightforward and easy to extrapolate, this particular one has given me some extra grief, and I'll explain why. The census page I'm interested in is for sheet number 57 of Chippewa Township, Wayne County, Ohio, USA. Take a look at how it's displayed across the two most accessible genealogy sites: Ancestry.com FamilySearch.org On MyHeritage.com, you can't even find the record via search, as they do not allow page-by-page browsing and they were unable to index any of the residents on this page due to the poor digitized microfilm image. Oddly, I had an inkling that the original microfilmed image by NARA must have been of better quality,...
To kick off the summer of 2024, I jumped in the car with my parents for my first ever, legitimate road trip. I was intent on driving from Southern California up to Fort Rock, Oregon where my great grandparents, George and Myrtle Foltz, had homesteaded, and then taking the original Highway 1 all the way back down the Pacific Coast, meandering through all the majestic redwoods. The excursion was many years in the making, and so, too, is this travelogue documenting every stop! My parents had both previously visited Fort Rock, but I needed to see it for myself after all the research I had done on the property. Plus, after watching the BBC series Detectorists and countless episodes of The Curse of Oak Island , I was convinced that waving a metal detector over the property would unlock further clues to my family's presence there. I plotted out a 10-day trip, and off we went! DAY 1 My NorCal friends were more than familiar with making a stop at Bravoland in Kettleman City, CA off the 5 ...