Writing Family Books

Hi Everyone,
Sorry to be gone so long.  Medical stuff came up and I went down!
Anyway, I am working on the Jeffery Family Book.  So far it is in chapters concerning each family per generation [I have so much info it is hard to figure out how to arrange the stories and information -ah, such travails...]  So I decided to go cronologicaly from the far back past to the current day.  Id start with John and Mary Bishop Jeffery coming from Ireland.  Then have a small blerb about each of their kids.  Then write more about the kids I know of.  Then go to the next generation and follow William and Mary Ferguson [and then Sarah Burney] Jeffery and their adventures.  And do a small bit about their kids and so on until I get to the more recent generations. 
I'm going to include pictures and illustrations.  This should be pretty nice.
The other idea I had was to invite family members to read the info and add their two cents.  There's others who know family stories or have letters and such that I don't have. So I thought it would be nice to get those bits of info in there if possible.
Then, there was finding out about the places where the Jeffery's lived at the time they lived there.  Ohio, when it was first being settled was apparently a tree covered expanse.  Old growth forest that blocked out the sun.  People who visited upper Ohio in the early to mid 1800's said it was a dark gloomy region where the only place to see some sun was where the settlers had felled many of the trees and tried to clear the land.  This is what the Jeffrey's had to do when they got to Congress, Wayne County, Ohio.

It's really fun to write about your ancestors and their lives and times.  I don't want to just collect a bunch of info to put in my family tree.  I want to know what happened to these people that were here before me.  So collecting any stories and publishing them for the next generations is where I'm at!

Eva Jeffery homesteads in South Dakota!

Made a discovery while I was searching for Dad's Jeffery relatives [we're looking in Ohio, Wisconsin and Nebraska].  His great-great-grandfather John Jeffery had a couple of half sisters that decided to homestead in south Dakota late in the 1800's!
Turns out that Eva's sister Mary Ann married Francis DeVoe and that may have been the reason Eva went up to Dakota Territory.  Because her sister and brother-in-law went.  Turns out that Francis DeVoe's brother George homesteaded land right next door to Francis and Mary Ann.  Eva was just a little bit aways in the same section.
So, how did I find all this out?
Well, a great aunt left her genealogy notes from when they where searching out family facts in the 1960's.  And one of these notes mentioned that the Jeffery girls came out to Nebraska and then went to South Dakota to homestead near Yankton.  That was all it said though!
Here these two women went off and did something women wern't supposed to be capable of doing.  Survived on a claim up in the Dakota Territory.  That would mean living ruder than folks down in the States.  The weather up there could be harsh.  Droughts, freezing winters, blizzards - all kinds of fun stuff!  And Eva went up and stayed on her own claim, no man around [she never did marry].
So, it was time to hit the Dakota Territory census and the BLM GLO records.
http://www.glorecords.blm.gov
the BLM patent search has a new setup now, with a few more fun tools.  And even though Eva Jeffery's homestead patent hasn't been indexed yet [therefore no image of the paperwork available yet], it does have this neat interface to look on a map and find just where our ancesters homestead was!

So, there's all the BLM info for Eva's homestead and a little map of the section and where it sits in today's world.  From this info a person can write to the National Archives to get the land patent info or to the local historical / genealogical society to find out more about and ancestor that made such a brave move [I chose the latter - I hope to get a little more info about Eva's life on the homestead, and if I'm lucky, they might be able to lead me to some photos!]

From the 1880 Yankton Dakota Territory census, it looks like Eva [called Rachel in some census] supported herself as a school teacher and lived with her sister's family until she could get her own claim [which is about right because the BLM records say she filed on her claim in October of 1882].
So there's more to look for.
In this same census we can see that their mother, Sarah Jeffery was living with the family also. It seems from the records that Eva Jeffery and her sister's family stayed in South Dakota for about twenty years and then moved to Deer Park, Washington.  Well, what was in Washington that brought on such a change in living places?
Sarah Burney Jeffery is buried next to her husband William Jeffery in the Rose Hill Cemetery in Waverly, Lancaster County, Neb.  I surmise that she died in Yankton and that not long after, her girls moved to Washington State.
Now to find out what was out west!