US-Kentucky Archives - Genealogical.com

Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio, 1779-1781

gpcdevel — Fri, 03 May 2019 20:23:56 +0000

This collection of original documents chronicles two critical years of the Revolutionary War along the western frontier of the United States. Originally published as Volume V in the distinguished Draper Series of the Wisconsin Historical Society, the documents were selected by Louise Phelps Kellogg, a leading authority on frontier history at the time of the book’s original publication. Readers are encouraged to read Mrs. Kellogg’s instructive historical Introduction which elucidates the events chronicled in the documents. The central figure in the book is Col. Daniel Brodhead, the commandant at Fort Pitt. At the outset, Brodhead is relishing his victories over the western Indians in the vicinity of the fort and longing to invade the country of the Five Nations. Circumstances would conspire to frustrate the colonel from achieving his objective. Probably his greatest accomplishment was squelching a large Loyalist uprising in 1780. At the end of the day, his ambitions, repressive treatment of the civilian population, and questionable ethics combined would set back the American cause on the frontier between 1779 to 1781.

Most of the action described in the correspondence and other documents unfolds in the frontier communities of Fort Pitt, Fort Vincennes, Detroit, Wheeling, and other places in western Pennsylvania, southwestern Virginia, and Kentucky. Genealogists should savor the accounts of the remarkable conditions under which their frontier ancestors were forced to live. They will also find numerous references to the thousands of settlers who flocked into the region at this time, despite the threat of Indian reprisal. The comprehensive index at the back of the work makes it easy to find them.

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Kentucky Pension Roll for 1835

gpcdevel — Fri, 03 May 2019 20:23:27 +0000

Excerpted from theU.S. Pension Roll of 1835

, this is a thoroughly comprehensive list of pensioners residing in Kentucky in that year. The book is divided into four parts, each of which is arranged by county and thereunder alphabetically according to the surname of the pensioner. The first two parts, by far the shortest of the four, list invalid pensioners and combatants who died in the service of their country and in whose names pensions were applied for. The bulk of the book provides the following information, county by county, on each Kentucky pensioner living in 1835: name, rank, pension allowance, sums received, state of service, when placed on the pension roll, date pension commenced, age, and, on occasion, remarks such as date of death, date dropped from the rolls, and so on. The concluding portion of the book consists of a county-by-county list of Kentucky residents who obtained pension benefits under the Pension Act of May 1828. In all, some 2,500 Kentucky pensioners are named in the work.

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Revolutionary Soldiers in Kentucky: Also a Roster of the Virginia Navy

gpcdevel — Fri, 03 May 2019 20:20:00 +0000

Nearly all the adult male settlers of Kentucky had seen service in the Revolutionary War, and this 0was especially true of the settlers from Virginia, many of whom had been granted bounty lands in Kentucky for their Revolutionary services. In addition to a roll of the officers of the Virginia Line who received land bounties in Kentucky, this work includes a roll of the Revolutionary pensioners in Kentucky, a list of the Illinois Regiment that served under George Rogers Clark in the Northwest Campaign, and a roster of the Virginia Navy, amounting in total to about 6,500 individuals. The important roll of pensioners, alphabetically arranged under each county, contains about 3,000 names, with rank or grade, the state they served from, character of service, the act under which they were beneficiaries, the date they were placed on the rolls, and their ages.

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A History of Anderson County [Kentucky] 1780-1936

gpcdevel — Thu, 02 May 2019 19:43:56 +0000

The McKee-Bond history is an authoritative account of both the county and its citizens from the earliest pioneer days through the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the county’s municipal organizations, settlements, wars, and nineteenth-century institutions. The narrative teems with names of persons associated with schools, churches, and government, not to mention over fifty personal and family sketches of considerable interest to the researcher.

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History of Woodford County, Kentucky

gpcdevel — Thu, 02 May 2019 19:43:00 +0000

Woodford County, Kentucky–originally a part of Fayette County, Virginia, and the parent of at least eight present-day Kentucky counties–was first surveyed and shaped in 1788. Railey’s History takes the county through the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the original migrant settlers in the period following the Revolution. The book contains hundreds of family sketches, each with data on the original Kentucky immigrant, his wife and children, and their distinguished and numerous progeny. Also interspersed throughout the book are lists of marriage, census, and military records accounting for the names of an additional 5,000 early Woodford County residents.

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The Big Sandy Valley

gpcdevel — Thu, 02 May 2019 19:43:48 +0000

This excellent regional history is crammed with lists of early settlers, heads of families, and Revolutionary pensioners. It deals with the region (mostly in Eastern Kentucky) known as the Big Sandy Valley, which today encompasses all or part of sixteen counties in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia.

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Historic Families of Kentucky

gpcdevel — Thu, 02 May 2019 19:43:00 +0000

Historic Families of Kentucky is a basic history of the state, with considerable emphasis on the accomplishments of the pioneer families, including their public service in the nation’s struggle for independence and existence. The objective of the book is to trace from their origin in this country a number of Kentucky families of Scotch-Irish extraction whose ancestors immigrated to America in the early 18th century and became pioneers of the Valley of Virginia. Descendants of these families of the Valley were among the early pioneers of Kentucky. Among these families, of whome some account is given in the text, are those of Alexander, Allen, Anderson, Andrews, Ball, Barbour, Bell, Benton, Birney, Brashear, Breckinridge, Brown, Buford, Bullett, Burden, Butler, Campbell, Carlisle, Carrington, Carson, Carthrae, Chrisman, Clark, Clay, Crittenden, Cummings, Dickson, Duke, Fontaine, Harbeson, Hardin, Harvey, Harvie, Hawkins, Helm, Innes, Irvine, Jones, Keith, Le Grand, Lewis, Logan, Lyle, Madison, Marshall, McAlpine, McClung, McClure, McDowell, McKnight, McPheeters, Monroe, Montgomery, Moore, Murray, Neil, Newton, Parker, Patton, Paxton, Pickett, Preston, Price, Randolph, Reade, Reed, Reid, Smith, Starling, Strother, Taylor, Thornton, Todd, Wallace, Warner, Washington, and Woodson.

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The German Element in the Ohio Valley: Ohio, Kentucky & Indiana

gpcdevel — Thu, 02 May 2019 19:38:00 +0000

In 1880 Gustav Koerner (1809-96), one-time Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois and confidant of Abraham Lincoln, published a comprehensive history of Germans in America entitled Das deutsche Element in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika, 1818-48. Dr. Don Heinrich Tolzmann has here translated and edited selected chapters from Koerner covering the states of Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana and adding extensive references to additional sources. This marks the second volume adapted by Dr. Tolzmann from the Koerner opus; The German Element in the North East: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and New England was published in 2010.

Disinclined to write a history of German immigration to the United States, Gustav Koerner set about to describe and assess the 19th-century contributions–his coverage substantially exceeded 1848–of Germans to American life and society. In this context he considers the role of Germans and German-Americans in helping to establish Cincinnati as the center of Ohio Valley commerce, the plethora of German-language newspapers, the various religious denominations, the German Democratic Party, struggles against Nativism, Germans in the American Civil War, and so forth.

For the most part, however–and genealogists are the beneficiaries–the work portrays the German element through the lives of individuals. Accordingly, Koerner offers a wealth of biographical information about people such as Martin Baum, Wilhelm Nast, Dr. Joseph H. Pulte, Heinrich A. Ratterman, Georg Walker, Ludwig Rehfuss, General Gotfried Weitzel, Nikolaus Hoffer, Pastor August Kroll, Gustav Tafel, Christian Heyl, Wilhelm Schmidt, Johann H. Ropke, G. W. Barth, Albert Lange, Johann Georg Rapp, and many others. Even better, researchers will find more comments concerning Koerner’s subjects and their families and careers in Mr. Tolzmann’s annotated footnotes to the text itself, making this translation an important addition to the literature of 19th-century German-Americans.

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Henry County [Kentucky] Cemeteries: Parts I, II, and III

gpcdevel — Thu, 02 May 2019 19:37:00 +0000

This collection of transcriptions of gravestones from a large number of Henry County, Kentucky, cemeteries originally appeared in three issues of The Filson Club History Quarterly (July and September 1978, and July 1979) and is reprinted here with permission of The Filson Club. Mr. Johnson, then a member of the Oldham County Historical Society, prepared the first two installments; Mrs. Dent, an active Filsonian and local historian, prepared the final part. Taken as a whole, the work identifies Henry County inhabitants buried in 83 different cemeteries, including the large South Pleasureville Public Cemetery, whose records occupy almost all of Mrs. Dent’s portion.

The arrangement of the records is consistent throughout–by cemetery and thereunder alphabetically. Each entry gives the name of the deceased, date or year of death, and, in the overwhelming number of cases, date or year of birth. The transcribers also recorded any additional information found on the stones that could be of use to genealogists, such as name of spouse or other relation, military service, county of birth, and so forth. In the aggregate, the records cover individuals who were born as early as the 1790s and other individuals who died as late as the 1960s. In all, researchers will find references to over 6,000 persons who died in Henry County.

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Documentary History of Dunmore’s War 1774

gpcdevel — Thu, 02 May 2019 19:36:43 +0000

Dunmore’s War of 1774 was the culmination of a long series of disputes between settlers and Native Americans in western Virginia and Pennsylvania. In an effort to quell the increasingly violent Indian incursions, Virginia Governor John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore, carried on a successful retaliatory campaign known as “Dunmore’s War.” This book presents a history of that war through the use of primary documents selected from the mass of manuscript historical material in the famous Draper Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Over a period of nearly fifty years, the late Dr. Lyman Copeland Draper collected papers and oral histories from many of the survivors of Dunmore’s War and their descendants. These personal recollections and anecdotes, filled with graphic accounts of massacres and reprisals, provide a first-hand look at the hair-raising life led by the pioneers and the logistics of warfare along the frontier. Numerous footnotes throughout the volume provide a wealth of biographical information, as do the lists of muster rolls and biographies of field officers at the end of the book.

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