Continued from 17 October 2017. So here is what it was
like, doing genealogy research through the Internet about 1992: I would
send a query to the AOL Genealogy group and then go do the dishes. About
twenty minutes later, I would check on my query, and the message would
be crawling across the green screen at 300 Baud (300 bits per second). I would enter my findings into PAF 1.0 on my computer.
That is how I found my great-great-grandfather, James Sherrill, 1830 - 1913. Mary Davis, a kind genealogist in Denton, Texas was in the AOL genealogy group watching for queries on Sherrills. She had TWO ROOMFULS of Sherrill records.
Her first message was that it would take her awhile to sift the records, but she was sure she could place him in the proper family soon. She found a reference to James in the journal of his older sister Margaret Sherrill. I learned about his childhood on the Coosa River in Alabama, and how his parents moved the family to Iowa in 1846.
James married Mary Ann Evans in 1852 in Pottawatomie County, Iowa, and the note on their marriage record rocked my world: it said they were heading over the Oregon Trail, planning to go to the California gold fields. I started digging into the trail of records left by James Sherrill - marriage record, census records, land records. I discovered that somewhere along the Oregon Trail, they decided to go to Oregon and farm instead of California and dig.
I was digging still, and what turned up was better than gold. I learned the story of my Great-great-grandfather, his wife and children, and in-laws. Tomorrow I'll tell you more about my remarkable Oregon Trail ancestors - what they endured, what they overcame, what they created.
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