Saturday, July 20, 2013

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - The Rivers of Your Ancestors

Hey genea-folks, 
it's Saturday Night again, 

 time for more Genealogy Fun!

 

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:


1)  I posted 
The "Rivers of America" Map yesterday, and demonstrated how to find the downstream course of a river in the United States, or the upstream watershed area of a river.  Please refer to that blog post.

2)  This week, your Saturday Night Genealogy Fun mission is to make a map using the National Atlas map (at http://nationalatlas.gov/streamer/Streamer/streamer.htmlshowing the downstream course of a river that one of your ancestors may have traveled on.  What does it tell you?  What did you learn?  Did they live at other places on that river, or downstream of that river?  

3)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own (please show us the map you created - use an image snipping tool or take a screen shot), or make a comment here on this post, or write a Facebook status or a Google+ stream post.  

Here's mine:

I was curious about the river system in Mercer County, Pennsylvania.  My Carringer family migrated from there to Louisa County, Iowa in the late 1850s.  I don't know if they traveled by horse/oxen and wagon or by river and then wagon.  If they went by river, I figured that they went down by wagon to a place on the Ohio River, then down the Ohio River to the Mississippi River and up the Mississippi River to Louisa County, Iowa.  

I am interested in the rivers and creeks around Perry township, Mercer County, Pennsylvania.  Here is a zoomed in map of the area (unfortunately, county boundaries are hard to see):




The Martin Carringer family settled in 1796 right about where the red dot is on the map above (I put it there are then copied the image).   This appears to be one of the highest spots in the area.  As you can see, there is Neshannock Creek to the south of the homestead, which drains to the south, through the towns of Mercer and New Castle to Beaver, where it empties into the Ohio River.  The stream to the north of the red dot is the Little Shenango River which drains through Greenville, Sharpsville and New Castle, and thence to Beaver and into the Ohio River.  

The watercourse for the Little Shenango River is:



The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2013/07/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-rivers-of.html

Copyright (c) 2013, Randall J. Seaver

3 comments:

GeneGinny said...

Great SNGF, Randy.
Here's my response:
http://geneginny.blogspot.com/2013/07/sngf-rivers-of-our-ancestors.html

Susan Clark said...

Great prompt, Randy! Here's my response.
SNGF with the Nolichucky River

Heather Wilkinson Rojo said...

Ah, the curse of being a New England Yankee. All my ancestors lived along the coast, or just upriver a few miles where the water was still salty. If I participated it would soooo boring. You have some more interesting contributions here than I could provide... Neat website link!