Genealogy Research

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I’ve been working on my family tree for about four years now, and I love it.  It is like a huge puzzle and I’ve been lucky to find lots of pieces to this family puzzle, albeit with investing lots of time into it.   Since I am not working right now since we are living in Mexico, I am able to work on my family tree nearly daily.  Living in Mexico though of course limits my ability to do non-Internet research, but my family and some kind genealogists I met over the Internet have helped me advance considerably by looking up obituaries and/or e-mailing me their memories whenever I’ve asked.

 

I use a program called Family Tree Maker 11 by Broderbund to keep all of my family tree research.  It’s a great program although the technical support leaves a great amount to be desired.  So far though it has worked fairly well, and I got a three-month free subscription to census records online at genealogy.com which has proved of great help with my research.

I grew up in Erie, Illinois, which is located in Whiteside County in the northwestern part of Illinois, near the border of Iowa.  It is a small town of 1600 people, and it was a great place to grow up.  Erie, a community closely tied to agriculture, is in the Rock River Valley. The principle landmark, a small triangle shaped park in the business district, was purchased by the village's founders for $15 in 1872. Many of the early settlers of Erie were natives of Erie County, N.Y., on Lake Erie and the name of that lake was transferred to the body of water near their homes. When the precinct was organized, it became known as Erie, which name descended to the present township”, as stated in a Moline Dispatch article.

This website is about my family of course, but also includes a lot of information about Erie – its history and the people who lived in it.  Nearly all of my paternal ancestors first came to Erie in the 1850s, and my paternal grandmother Olive Mae (Eddy) Dail kept a scrapbook of newspaper articles about many Erie people from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.  I am transcribing these articles and will include them on this website to help other people with ancestors from Erie, even if we aren’t related.  Even so, if your relative lived in Erie in the early 1900s, chances are that somewhere your family member is located on my family tree, no matter how distant the relation is.  I’ve found that it’s really true what they say about everyone being related in small towns. J

 

Please check out all of my research findings below and let me know what you think.  My e-mail address is [email protected] if you want to send me any comments, corrections or help or just say hi!

View the latest version of my family tree – last updated 26 July 2004

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