One of my reasons for reviving this blog is to chronicle a
trip my wife and I decided to take with her parents. We went to Pennsylvania
and Ohio to do some research on her family tree and visit some of the sites of
her paternal line. Taking valuable vacation time off work to do this, we wanted
to make sure we spent our time wisely and got the most out of this trip.
As I’ve learned on this genealogical journey, you can chase
a lot of rabbit trails. When gas money and hotel costs are on the line, you
can’t afford any boondoggles. So we started by coming up with a strategy. What lines did we want to pursue? What individuals in our tree did
we want to focus on? What sites are associated with them that will yield the
most information or context?
At the top of the list is my wife’s 2x great grandfather,
Parris Eaches. We believed he was a stagecoach driver on the National Road and
was apparently a very colorful fellow. But we didn’t have much information
other than that. We didn’t even know if we had the correct spelling of his
first name! So we decided one of our first stops would be Harrisburg. As the
capital of PA, we believed their state archives should house all the census
records and newspaper obituaries we needed to fill in the blanks.
Then we planned to head west to Pittsburgh where he is
buried, and on to Ohio where his children eventually settled. Ohio is also home
to the National
Road Museum where we hoped to see some great artifacts and exhibits on the
history along Parris’ work route.
Of course we also scheduled some other worthwhile stops like
Gettysburg. But we had fun constructing the guardrails for our family history
road trip adventure.
Stay tuned for my account of our trip…
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