Foundations (52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks)

Back in the mid 1980s, my mom, Lynda Lindbeck Mohney, received a letter asking about (or passing on information about) her family history. Just what we needed to send us on a voyage that has lasted nearly 40 years. She and my son, Shaun (who was probably around 5 or so at the time), were going to our cabin near Owl's Nest and Sackett, that week. While there, she started looking for some records about my dad, Donald Mohney's family as they were from the Elk County area. I was unaware that she was doing that but had started some research myself, using a family tree that my paternal grandmother, Margaret Annetta Book Mohney, had drawn on the inside cover of a scrapbook. 

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You have to remember that back then, there was no internet, and computers were still rare in private homes. Cell Phones were pretty much unheard of - and if you had one, you carried it in a backpack. Call waiting wasn't even a feature- some places still had party lines, and the only privacy you got while making a phone call was to take the phone, trailing the cord into the cellar landing and close the door. Televisions got 3 or 4 stations and went off the air before midnight. Rabbit ears helped to bring channels in closer and children served as the remote control when dad was kicked back in the recliner. -----------

All of that is to explain that the beginnings of my genealogy research were the old style- digging through paper records, scrolling through miles of census on microfilm, visiting dusty courthouse basements, walking through cemeteries on rainy days, etc. In a day, on Ancestry, I can do research equal to a year of research back then. We used phone books and called people with the surname we were researching and stopped to visit distant cousins, wrote letters and sent them out hoping to get information back. I held original 200 year old wills and deeds in my hands, knowing that my ancestors had touched and signed them. 

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Mom's original trip to the courthouse in Ridgeway, Elk County, PA lead to a family dispute and one of my aunts didn't talk to her for some time. Mom had found a marriage license for my grandfather, Valentine Edward Mohney, and it wasn't the license to marry Grandma! Valentine had been married before meeting her and his first wife had died in childbirth, along with their child. My aunt couldn't believe that her father had been married and that she was unaware of it. 

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Lucky for me, the New Castle Public Library was only about a half-hour from home and had an amazing genealogy room. And many of Grandma's ancestors were among the original settlers of the Beaver, Mercer, Lawrence County areas. I was able to locate the sites of their original lands and in some cases, their homes.  

-----What an amazing foundation this type of research laid and how many hours of enjoyment were spent! Since then, I have worked on compiling histories of all my family lines, my son's paternal lines, my grandsons' maternal lines, several friends' have their ancestry documented, and I have assisted unknown numbers of researchers through Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness, compiling records of (and pictures of) multiple cemetery listings, and sharing information. 

------And I continue working to add documentation and repair mistakes that were made early on.

------  Donna E. Mohney January 5, 2022