What I and my twenty-eight cousins found

A good amount of time has been spent on looking for (and finding) land records for the SPECK and TOWNSEND families. These are my people and are introduced in "Two Quaker Cemeteries." I pretty much know where to look for the SPECK land from southeast Ohio, to Illinois, to Iowa and Kansas, until a few generations later, some of them moved on to Washington, Oregon and California.

I've documented some of our SPECK properties from southeast Ohio and Kansas with my own map-making, some of which you can see in "Maps for Two Quaker Cemeteries." http://sites.google.com/site/mapsfortwoquakercemeteries/

Tracking was a little different with the Townsends. There are so many of them, and they were always everywhere, but the ones I wanted to track were the ones in Virginia, Maryland and into Pennsylvania, the latter state being where thousands of early pioneers traveled into and around Washington County, Pennsylvania to await the signing of the treaties which would permit settlement in Ohio. And there they were, most of them with names that matched who we thought were brothers of Sarah Townsend. We still haven't found Sarah's families.

I had not realized that people were not waiting just a few weeks to get into Ohio. Many of them purchased property and waited years - to get the best opportunity when the time came to cross the Ohio River from western Pennsylvania.

Are you a Townsend descendant from Virginia and/or Maryland in the mid 1700's? That's where our families were when we first found them. God Bless old Uncle Isaac Speck - my second great uncle. He left a family history published in 1901 that contains literally the first four and part of the fifth generations of our first immigrant Speck who arrived in America in 1774. Through searching the internet, I finally collected about 28 cousins who were building their own lines from this first immigrant, just as I was doing. Needless to say, We have found practically all of them.

So it's an interesting study. I leave you with these paragraphs until next time. Please leave comments.