Monday, March 16, 2009

From Little Drummer Boy to Old Pioneer

If you’ve used Heritage Quest Online (HQO), you know the rewards just waiting for you to find the right combination of names, dates and places for family or community history discoveries.

And you probably know that with your JCPL library card you can do that research at home, to use a clichĂ©, in your “jammies” at 3 o’clock in the morning. (If you have any trouble getting logged on, give us a call at the library.)


A great find for me came from locating someone other than a relative (although that has happened as well) … and confirming the story of a Revolutionary War veteran buried in a deep woods about a mile south of the northwestern JC village of Kurtz.

The Owen Township Cemeteries book published in 1990 by the Jackson County Genealogical Society identifies John Edwards (1762 Wales-1836 Indiana) as a drummer in the 8th Pennsylvania Regiment. Information on the tiny Edwards Cemetery was compiled by Mary B. and Malcolm W. Buckner and Lucy C. Arthur in 1987 and updated by Ruth Fox in 1989.

By logging into HQO and going to the Revolutionary War database where I searched the surname Edwards and Pennsylvania, I found 15 pages – images of original documents held at the National Archives (NARA) – in view on my screen. The file includes the NARA file number that accompanies the information published by JCGS.


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