Just out–the brand new 2012 edition of Journal of York County Heritage, a popular periodical published annually by York County Heritage Trust. The new edition offers five well-researched articles on a variety of events from the 19th and 20th centuries. They include: “The Cartridge Box: The Inside-Out Newspaper of the
Where did all those people to the west of us come from? A lot of their families started out here, in south central Pennsylvania, a couple of hundred years ago. Some of them: the Morrows, the Ruhls and the Kinselys are highlighted in my recent York Sunday News column, which
I’ve been doing some research lately on early York County furniture makers and found that there were many more of these skilled craftspeople than I realized. It does make sense–everyone needed furniture and few were wealthy enough to have it “imported” from Baltimore or Philadelphia. The existing tax lists from
We tend to think of our ancestors and their contemporaries as very strait-laced. Sometimes nothing can be farther from the truth. That’s what is so fascinating about using original documents as historical sources. Those letters, diaries, and newspapers they left behind sometime fairly sizzle with crime, intrigue, and scandal. For
You know my theory that all roads lead back to York? Here is another example. The small city of Galion, with about 11,500 people, sits in the northern part of Ohio, about half way across the state. They are on U.S. Route 30, like York. They have an industrial past,
York County is part of what is known as a “cultural hearth,” an area from which ideas and culture spread throughout much of the country as settlers moved on. In a recent post, I showed how the Great Wagon road, shown on the 1751 Fry-Jefferson map, carried pioneers to the
Click here for the Library of Congress zoomable 1751 Fry-Jefferson map. I recently wrote about York County residents being recruited to move to Virginia in the 1870s. Click here to read that post. There were several paths, following very early roads, from South Central Pennsylvania to less populated lands.
Did you know people from this area were actively recruited to move to Virginia? I knew that as the families of Pennsylvania German and Scots-Irish of South Central Pennsylvania grew, parts of those families migrated down through Western Maryland and Western Virginia. As those areas filled up, the progression continued