1 comments about Ohio Genealogical Research.

1. The series by Mr. Schweitzer covering a number of states is an excellent starting point for most researchers as well as a handy reference to have. Mr. Schweitzer begins with a brief historical overview of the state's settlement, geography, industries, migration and the like which helps to paint a picture of what likely drew your ancestors there. Mr. Schweitzer's writing style is very plain and direct and he includes a wonderful county by county listing of resources for each state as well as overall statewide resources and records available at the Federal level. There are undoubtedly books that go into greater detail on each state but the Schweitzer series are a great starting point and well worth the money if you're researching there. His titles usually have to be ordered at local booksellers so Amazon is your best bet at getting these quickly and painlessly. One particular note is that this title was written years ago and some telephone numbers and addresses have changed and some groups or societies may be dormant or closed. Additionally Mr. Schweitzer does not make reference to internet sources or email addresses, which is just as well as they tend to get out-of-date quite quickly. I've gotten considerable use out of this title on Ohio and it to be very helpful.

1 comments about Mixing the Waters: Envrionment, Politics, and the Building of the Tennessee -Tombigee Waterway (The University of Akron Press Series on Technology a).

1. This book takes an in-depth look at the politics behind the building of one of the largest and costliest waterway projects in U.S. history! If you're ever wondering about the enigmatic U.S. Army Corps. of Engineers and what they do with your tax dollars, then read this book! Even if you've never heard of the Army Corps. of Engineers, then read this book to see what questionable water projects that are built with taxpayers' dollars and destroys the environment. You'll be disturbed and offended at the game of "power politics" that goes into deciding which states get "pork" projects. I never thought that a book about a waterway could be so interesting, but Dr. Stine writes with an elucidating and poignant style. Thoroughly researched and objectively written, this book is sure to make you think twice about how your tax dollars are spent

No comments about Unearthing The Land (Ohio History and Culture).

No comments about Ohio Source Records from The Ohio Genealogical Quarterly.

2 comments about Ohio's Grand Canal: A Brief History of the Ohio & Erie Canal.

1. This book delivers what the title implies: A near-flawless history of the Ohio & Erie canal. Its chapters on the Lessee and declining years of the canal were excellent.



2. I bought this book for a family member who lives in the Zoar, Ohio area. He enjoyed the local history as he has been to many areas along the canal site. I would purchase this book again. Always good to support local authors as well!!

No comments about Gravestone Inscriptions In Ross County, Ohio - Vol. III (Volume 3).

No comments about Gravestone Inscriptions In Ross Co. Oh - I & II.

3 comments about Showplace of America: Cleveland's Euclid Avenue, 1850-1910 (Ohio).

1. A wonderful trip back to Millionaire's Row, and the unbelievable homes that lined Cleveland's Euclid Avenue (including the fascinating men who built them), in the late 1800's. Plenty of pictures too. A must book for any lover of Cleveland history.



2. This publication was exactly what I was looking for. Amazon found it --- and sent it to me quickly.



3. It's been 3 days and I haven't been able to put this book down. Absolutely fascinating. And of course the pictures are my favorite part.

2 comments about Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood (Ohio History and Culture).

1. Perhaps there is no mystery quite so tantalizing and yet in the end so unsolvable as that of one's own identity; that nagging question that is always nibbling at the very edge of one's consciousness: Who am I?
   
   Because although the subtitle of Goosetown, Joyce Dyer's slim third volume of memoirs, is Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood, this is no straightforward sociological study and careful researching of an inner city area which has nearly disappeared. Not by any stretch of the imagination. What Dyer is really doing here is continuing what she began in those other two books. Like so many memoirists, she is simply still trying to figure out who she is. Trying to remember those first five years of her life may be an impossible task, but in the course of seeking out those years, she learns some dark secrets about her Haberkost grandparents, whose intermittent rages, long silences and disappearances she now understands as early signs and inklings of mental illness and probably hereditary dementia.
   
   This is a book filled with mysteries - grandfathers and other relatives who drank, a mother who was distant, a loving aunt who filled that gap, an uncle who was perhaps a better father than her own. Family ghosts, skeletons and characters abound in Goosetown, making it a difficult book to put down. Indeed, I read it in just a couple of sittings in a single day.
   
   While Dyer does fulfill the promise of her subtitle in providing a history and a good picture of the physical geography of what was Goosetown (now mostly gone), she dwells at much greater length on the inner geography of her own extended family. There is her stern and forbidding grandfather, August Haberkost; her cousin Eddie, killed by a car at five; her loving and maternal Aunt Ruth; and her cousins Paul and Carol. But most of all there is her Uncle Paul, twice widowed and the self-proclaimed "Mayor of Goosetown," now an octagenarian who assists her in her quest to find again the old vanished neighborhood, and also gently teaches her about more important things, like forgiveness, and knowing when to just let go of the past.
   Dyer is, it seems to me, unflinchingly honest in this look at herself and her family. She was equally honest in her portrayal of her father in her previous memoir, Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town. And yet she accuses herself of holding back certain things about herself in her writing. "I don't lie, exactly, but I keep things hidden." She hints at secrets she has yet to share, things she hasn't "the courage to talk about." But she knows the danger of this. "Words held inside can be as fatal as internal hemorrhaging," she writes. "I have no idea what damage my secrets have already done to me."
   
   Because of comments like this, I suspect we have not heard the last from this exquisitely talented memoirist. I hope I'm right. Because Goosetown, her best book yet, continues to spin out that common thread that connects us all as imperfect, fallible human beings. There is a connection between writer and reader here that can only be found in writing of the very highest caliber. More, please, Ms. Dyer. - Tim Bazzett, author of PINHEAD: A LOVE STORY



2. Joyce Dyer is searching for what she considers her "missing years," those first four or five years of life of which few people can salvage many reliable memories. Dyer does remember a few things about when she lived in Goosetown, an Akron neighborhood, but she wonders if her memories are more akin to the product of someone else's stories or of the few old photographs of herself in Goosetown settings she has studied. Now, along with her elderly uncle, Dyer is traveling the streets of her old neighborhood in search of buildings and street corners that might help her recover memories of a time and place she barely recalls.
   
   "Goosetown: Reconstructing an Akron Neighborhood" is as much about Dyer's reconstruction of what she knows about her family as it is about reconstructing the old neighborhood. She finds, despite how little Goosetown now resembles the area she remembers, that the buildings, homes and other physical markers from her youth point her toward truths about herself and her family she never expected to learn. Goosetown may no longer exist, but what it can teach her about her family will change her forever.
   
   Joyce Dyer, in effect, had two sets of parents. Joyce's mother reacted badly to her birth and was never able to fully accept, or fill, her role as mother to the little girl, and her father dealt with the problem largely by ignoring it and getting on with his own life. Luckily, Joyce's Aunt Ruth (her mother's sister) and Uncle Paul were there to give her the love and guidance she did not always get at home. Joyce spent as much time with Ruth and Paul as she spent with her own parents, and she became as much a sister to their son Paul as she was his cousin. She was also close to her young cousins Carol and Eddie, although Eddie was struck and killed on a Goosetown street when he was just five years old.
   
   Now, all these years later, it is her 89-year-old Uncle Paul, a man who has outlived two wives and jokingly calls himself the "Mayor of Goosetown," who accompanies Dyer on her quest. Paul is there to answer her questions and to put what she learns about her Haberkost grandparents into its proper perspective. Some revelations are triggered by the neighborhood's geography; others come from her study of public records, family letters and diaries; and still others are mined from the memories of relatives. What she learns about her family's history of alcoholism, depression and its tendency to suffer from Early-Onset Alzheimer's explains to her much about the family skeletons she had never really understood.
   
   Near the end of "Goosetown," Dyer hints about the skeletons still in her own closet and what remains to be said if she is ever to tell the whole truth - all the things she keeps inside at the risk of her own well-being. Perhaps what she has learned about Goosetown and her family will make it easier for her to reveal the rest of her story. I hope so.

3 comments about The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock (Shawnee Classics).

1. This book tells the story of the outlaws of the early West (western Kentucky, southeastern Illinois, and Tennessee from around 1795 to 1820). These men were not the gun-toting, bank-robbing criminals of the Wild West but were highway robbers and river pirates who most often wielded knives and axes. They preyed on pioneers living in isolated cabins in the wilderness and on traders coming down the Ohio River on flatboats or traveling inland along wilderness trails.

   Most of these criminals at one time or another used Cave-in-Rock as their headquarters. This huge cave, on the Illinois side of the lower Ohio River, is about 85 miles below Evansville, Indiana.

   The most notorious of all the criminals of this time and place were the two Harpe brothers, who were said to kill men, women, and children simply to gratify a lust for cruelty. One story epitomizes the brutality of their exploits: Traveling through western Kentucky, the Harpes came to a cabin, where they found only a mother and her baby, the husband being off hunting. They asked to spend the night, and the next morning they asked the woman to prepare breakfast for them. She consented to do so but said that it would take her some time because her child was not well and she had no one to nurse it. The men then said that she should put the baby in its cradle and they would rock it while she cooked. After the woman had served their breakfast, she went to the cradle to see if the child was asleep, expressing some astonishment that her child should remain quiet for so long a time. She found the infant lying breathless, its throat cut from ear to ear.

   "Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock" was first published in 1923 and was recently reprinted by Southern Illinois University Press. Historians, amateur and professional, will value this book interesting for the light it sheds on a period of the nation's history that has received too little attention.




2. This book by a noted historian tells how river pirates and wilderness highwaymen (and women) preyed on westward travelers in the 1800s.
   
   As the country developed westward, a particular mix of men and women criminals practiced their arts at the moving edge of civilization and law. Whether traveling by land or river, many travelers passed through Southern Illinois during this time and had to deal with criminals whose practices were sometimes beyond imagination. A central player in this drama was the "Cave-in-Rock", a large cavern that opens appealingly upriver on the Ohio near the present day village and state park of the same name.
   
   While the cavern functioned as an Inn and Tavern that was a welcome sight to travelers, at times the proprietors served up meyhem and murder along with the grog and gruel. This was aptly shown in the movie How the West Was Won.
   
   The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock focuses on the major criminal elements and their leaders that operated along the Ohio River near Cave-in-Rock and the nearby inlands of the Shawnee Hills. Mr. Rothert does an excelent job of distinguishing between documented and oral history and tells about the individuals as well as the events of interest. The blood lust and gold lust of some of the central figures is astounding and their resourcefulness in obtaining both is frightening.
   
   In showing the flavor of the dark side of humanity that plagued these westward travelers, The Outlaws of Cave-in-Rock is unmatched.



3. Very interesting, would have liked more factual records, but realize going back to Revolutionary times might
   be hard to cover.