Guernsey County Genealogical Society

08/31/2026

Sometimes a Civil War pension file gives you the family Bible without actually giving you the family Bible.

When Benjamin White’s mother applied for a pension based on his Civil War service in Company A of the West Virginia Cavalry, the family didn’t send in their Bible. Instead, sworn statements were accepted as evidence of the information recorded inside it.

Those statements provided the birth dates of Benjamin’s parents, his mother’s address, the names and birth dates of all the children, and even an assessment of the family’s land and personal property in Bald K**b, Boone County, West Virginia.

That’s the thing about Civil War pension files. You might order one looking for a soldier and end up finding his entire family.

Ready to see what’s in your ancestor’s file? Order your Civil War records today. https://civilwarrecords.com/pages/getstarted

08/31/2026

08/31/2026

LINK IN COMMENTS: I spent the last few days thinking about Dolly Parton. Like a lot of us, I was crushed when we lost her. Then my brain did what it always does. It turned her life into a genealogy lesson.

Take her song "Coat of Many Colors." Her mother stitched fabric scraps together while telling her the story of Joseph. Decades later, the Library of Congress put that recording in the National Recording Registry.

That is exactly how a documented family story gets built.

Nobody hands you an ancestor's life wrapped in a bow. You get a scrap here and a scrap there, then you sit down and stitch.

I was chasing a woman named Hattie Verplanck once. She was in the 1900 census in Liberty, New York as a boarder. Then she vanished. No marriage record in the county clerk's index. No death certificate in the state index. Nothing on Find a Grave. Brick wall.

The scrap that saved the case was four tiny lines in a local newspaper column, noting that Miss Verplanck went down to Paterson, New Jersey with the family she worked for. That single scrap led to city directories and a 1908 marriage under a botched spelling of her surname. Three junk records became a complete coat.

Dolly showed up and did the work. She wrote roughly 3,000 songs by treating her craft like a job. Most of us do genealogy in the margins. We sneak twenty minutes before bed or a stolen half hour on Sunday, then wonder why our tree has been stuck since 2019.

Treat your family history like a Dolly project. Cite every single scrap. Block ninety minutes a week on your calendar. Write down the story behind the photo in that decaying shoebox before it is gone.

I wrote a deep look into what happens when you bring Dolly's business smarts, generosity, and work ethic to your family history.

08/30/2026

Here is a grave that I found recently. Ross Wilson was born in 1852 and has inscribed on the stone "Co. B. 4th Reg. Cavalry" with a GAR marker. I noticed he would have been extremely young for the Civil war and after some research, I discovered he was a veteran of the Indian Wars, so the GAR marker is a bit misleading.

Has anyone else found a memorial like this?

08/30/2026

I often hear from people who are frustrated that the newspapers they want aren't online. I ask them if they've ASKED anyone to put them online and the answer is always no.
If you want something digitized, go ask Newspapers.com. They will look into it.

https://www.newspapers.com/contact/?subject=ContentInquiry

08/29/2026

If you have family members from any of these soldiers, please reach out to them.

The Wall That Heals® is a traveling three-quarter scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that tours the country with a mobile Education Center.

08/29/2026

Thirty-two of Ohio's eighty-eight counties are officially designated Appalachian, covering the entire southeastern third of the state, and almost nothing anyone says about Ohio applies to them.

The geology explains most of it. The last glacier stopped partway down Ohio and never reached the southeast. Everything north and west of that line got flattened, scoured and filled with rich glacial till, which is why that part of the state is farm country laid out in a grid. The southeast was left alone. Steep ridges, narrow hollows, sandstone cliffs, twisting creeks and roads that follow the water because there was no other option.

That means Appalachian Ohio does not look like the rest of Ohio at all. It looks like West Virginia, because it is the same landform continuing across the river.

The economy went a different direction too. Coal, iron, clay, salt and timber, rather than corn and soybeans. The Hanging Rock Iron Region in the south ran furnaces that supplied iron for the Civil War, and you can still find stone furnace stacks standing in the woods. Coal camps and company towns dotted the hills. When those industries left, they left the same way they left everywhere else in Appalachia, all at once and without a replacement.

Ohio's poorest counties are here. Athens, Vinton, Meigs, Adams, Pike, Morgan. Vinton County has fewer than 13,000 people and no traffic light on some accounts.

But the culture is distinct and worth taking seriously. Old-time and bluegrass music traditions. Foodways that came up through Virginia and Kentucky rather than from Germany and Poland like the north. Deep family networks. Hunting and gathering as real parts of the household economy, from ramps to morels to ginseng.

The land is the other asset. Wayne National Forest, Hocking Hills, Shawnee State Forest, Serpent Mound, the Ohio River towns of Marietta and Gallipolis.

Athens and Ohio University sit in the middle of it, which gives the region a university town that does not resemble anything else nearby.

Most of Ohio drives past it on the way to somewhere else.

08/26/2026

Interesting!

Spirit Houses on the graves within the Old Indian Burial Ground, Bay Mills, Michigan. The Bay Mills Indian Community is in Chippewa County, on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near the shoreline of Lake Superior on White Fish Bay. This cemetery is located northwest of Brimley, Michigan, not far from the Point Iroquois Light House. The cemetery was established in 1841 by the Ojibwe (Chippewa) Indians after they located in this area.

Additional photos of the Old Indian Burial Ground, Bay Mills, Michigan can be viewed here:
http://mygenealogyhound.com/vintage-photographs/michigan-photographs/Spirit-Houses-Old-Indian-Burial-Grounds-Cemetery-Bay-Mills-Michigan-photos.html

Another cemetery with Native American "Spirit Houses" is the Pentoga Park Cemetery in Iron County, Michigan:
https://www.mygenealogyhound.com/vintage-postcards/michigan-postcards/MI-Indian-Cemetery-Baraga-County-near-Baraga-and-Lanse-Michigan-vintage-postcard.html #

Also on My Genealogy Hound: View numerous graves and tombstones of the famous and infamous including: Elvis Presley, Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), Michael Landon, Dan Blocker (Hoss Cartwright), Jimmy Stewart, Chuck Connors, Don Knotts, John Wayne, Gene Autry, Mary Tyler Moore, James Dean, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Franklin, Jesse James, the victims of the Boston Massacre, Curly, Moe and Shemp Howard (Three Stooges), L. Frank Baum (Wizard of OZ), Fess Parker (Davy Crockett), "Wild Bill" Hickok, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Paul Revere, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Roy Orbison, Clifton Clowers (Wolverton Mountain), the world's smallest tombstone, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, Bob Ford (assassin of Jesse James), Clayton Moore (The Lone Ranger), Frank James, Lawrence Welk, plus unusual graves such as the mystery woman buried inside a boulder; and unusual engraved colonial era tombstones:
http://www.mygenealogyhound.com/vintage-postcards/Graves-Tombstones-Famous-Infamous-Otherwise-photos-postcards-and-images.htm

08/26/2026

If you have checked Family search for records and couldn’t find anything, check again. They are adding more records all the time.

If you've been waiting for records from countries like the Philippines, England, or Colombia, you're in luck. We just added 8 million new opportunities to add to your family story including-

—4.7 million civil and church records from the Philippines
—3 million+ civil and census records from Italy
—Significant record additions from Argentina, Belgium, Chile, Colombia, Cook Islands, and Ukraine

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Start exploring: https://www.familysearch.org/en/blog/new-records-july-2026?cid=SO-00062875

08/26/2026

Ohio is launching a way history lovers can help honor Revolutionary War veterans buried across the state. https://nbc4i.co/3UEMarL?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook_NBC4