I'm Writing a Book...

Photo Creative Commons License by happysweetmama

Yes, I am starting to write a book! Not the kind you will find on the regular bookshelves, though.

Actually there will be 2 books, with one written in collaboration with a cousin, about our family in the United States. I think that one will not be done in less than a year because there is so much still to research, and then to document. There have been a couple of basic books done before on our family, but they are full of errors and incomplete even in the first 2-3 generations.

My solo book will be about the men in our family who fought in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, French-Indian Wars and the Civil War. I had not thought there was enough material for a book but now that we have been working hard on the family tree, I have more than a hundred names. A lot of them are from Ohio, or at least came to Ohio after the Revolutionary War as pioneers.

In the War of 1812, long before Ohio was a state and still barely settled, there were over 26,000 men from what became Ohio who enlisted to assist the nation in this war. The numbers of Ohio men in the Civil War was staggering... over 310,000. Of those, 11,000+ died in battle and another 13,000+ died from disease.

After Ohio's participation in the Civil War (Why do they call it that? It certainly wasn't civil.) several veterans later became Presidents of the United States: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield and William McKinley.

I have never lived in Ohio, and my family has been gone from there a hundred years. However, I'm gaining a healthy respect for Ohio in the early days of the westward migration of this great nation, in spite of the many adverse things the government did. (Think broken treaties that drove the native population almost into oblivion, not to mention the buffalo that were still abundant in Ohio and Kentucky in the early 1800's.)

I hated history in school, but now with the perspective of my family background, it takes on a different image for me. Wanting to know why my people (not just one family, but whole families) moved from Maryland to western Pennsylvania, and then Ohio before going west to Iowa has caused me to look at the politics and economics of the time, and in turn, that has cast a whole new light on the American history we are taught in school.

Bear with me, and I'll try not to bore you too much with "history"!