My favorite hobby these days is a combination of local history and genealogy.
One current project involves putting together the facts from a disaster that happened not far from my home but twenty or more years before I was born.?ÿ A family living on a rented farm had two young boys under 10 years of age.?ÿ One day the boys managed to set the barn on fire and they ended up dying in the fire.?ÿ Within days their father died, leaving their mother all alone.?ÿ Eventually the mother remarried.?ÿ Many years later, in her old age, she and her husband died when their house caught fire in the middle of the night.?ÿ Trying to piece together more information is a big challenge.?ÿ My initial source of information about the death of the boys lived on that same farm when he was young, which would have been a few years after their death.?ÿ I was personally acquainted with a stepson of the woman involved but he died of cancer in 2000 so that potential source of information is lost.
A second current project is one I have been researching over the past two months and relates to the descendants of the families who endured the Pigeon Roost Massacre in 1812 in southern Indiana.?ÿ I am bringing together some of those descendants who live near here but had absolutely no idea they were related.?ÿ I provided a packet of information to a 92 year-old friend whose children were in grade school with me.?ÿ She had no idea of the connection to people she had known since she was a little girl.?ÿ She was excited to learn of this and is sharing the information with her family members.?ÿ One descendant is a current State Representative and another is the wife of a former Governor of the state.?ÿ They have simultaneously attended numerous political events over the decades but had no idea they were related.
