Wow, what a day... my head is spinning as I try to figure out all of the connections we discovered today...
We started the morning in the Fergus County Courthouse... this county doesn't let you search the books yourself, so we had to give the clerk a very long list of names that we wanted to have birth and/or death certificates for... She said we could leave the list and come back later in the day for the results...
So we left the courthouse and went to the Calvary Cemetery to look for gravesites of our daughter-in-law Jennifer's ancestors... and we found quite a few! (The world is starting to feel really, really small!) After we left the cemetery, Deb went to the local Catholic church and found documents that went with the people in the cemetery.
Then we went to the history museum... I was disappointed to find that it was closed for the season! But, true to the Montana cordiality, the woman in the Chamber office called the curator and she willingly came right down and opened the museum for us (another family history angel?) Inside I found many books that had articles on my ancestors and the history of the area... I bought the books to share with my father. In addition, there was a whole section of the museum dedicated to Jennifer's Croation ancestors... pictures, ducuments, etc. Deb took photos like crazy while I picked the brain of the curator, who knew some of my family. Jen's family came to Lewistown as stonemasons and built many of the early stone structures of the city...
Tonight we drove around the city to explore... this is the old high school where my grandmother and other members of my family went to school... It is now a condominium... kind of wierd.
These are examples of the structures that Jen's ancestors built... this was the medical center...
and the man that designed and managed the build of the medical building lived in this house that he built next door...
The Carnegie Library was also built by the Croation stonemasons.
When we went back to the library, we found that the researcher needed more time to research the records. We decided to stay in Lewistown one more day so deb can go to the library to look for obituaries in old newspapers (and they were not open on Monday), and I am going to see if I can talk to the people that lived down the road from my great uncle... I may also look up a guy in Moore that I think may be a shirt-tail relative. I have to admit that this family history research is fun when you can actually see the places and things in real life!
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