Cedar Hill Genealogical Society

06/17/2026

Research in the South: Cessions and Territories (Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida)
https://ighr.gagensociety.org/south/

06/14/2026

06/12/2026

Saw a line on another genealogy page that is good to remember: "The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

06/06/2026

It had the wingspan of a fighter jet and it could fly. Quetzalcoatlus was the largest flying animal that ever existed — forty feet from wingtip to wingtip, as tall as a giraffe when it folded its wings and walked on all fours. It launched itself into the air from a standing leap and crossed entire continents without landing. Standing on the ground it could look a grown man dead in the eye. There has never been anything like it before or since, and the sky has felt empty ever since it left. 🦅
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06/06/2026

The Walking Purchase Widows
Pennsylvania Frontier. 1737. Familes journey.

William Penn’s sons cheated the Lenape. “Walking Purchase.” Said they’d take as much land as a man could walk in 1.5 days.

They hired 3 runners. Cleared a path. Ran 65 miles. Took 1,200 square miles.

The Lenape lost everything.

But so did 3 white families.

The runners cut through farms. Burned cabins so the path was “clear.”

The McKees, The Sullivans, The Brodheads. Scotch-Irish. Just got there.

The men went to Philadelphia to fight it in court.

They never came back. Smallpox.

So the women walked.

Martha McKee, 34. Bridget Sullivan, 29. Mary Brodhead, 31.

11 children between them. Oldest 9. Youngest 6 months.

They walked 65 miles. Following the runners’ path in reverse.

Not to get the land back. To bury their husbands.

Took 11 days. Ate roots. Slept in trees.

Philadelphia didn’t let them in. “Indian trouble.”

So they squatted on the courthouse steps. 11 kids. 3 women.

For 6 weeks.

Governor Gordon finally saw them. Gave them 50 acres each. “To shut you up.”

They took it.

On Martha McKee’s land, they found the bodies. Her husband and the other 2. Buried in a ditch by the runners.

The women buried them proper.

Their farms became Allentown.

In the courthouse basement, there’s a plank. Carved: “M.M. B.S. M.B. 1737. We walked.”

05/24/2026

The Orphan Train Rider - Nebraska Plains, 1903
Thomas Kelly was 8. Irish. Parents dead from consumption in New York. In October 1903, the Children's Aid Society put him on an Orphan Train with 31 other kids. Tagged like luggage. "Boy, Age 8, Strong."

They stopped in every town from Chicago to Wyoming. Farmers came to "look them over." Checked teeth. Felt muscles. Took the strong ones for field work. Left the small ones.

In Kearney, Nebraska, no one picked Thomas. Too scrawny. End of the line. The agent said, "You'll ride back to New York. Try again next month."

Mrs. Eileen O'Malley, 52, was watching. Widow. Her own two sons died in a prairie fire in '97. She walked up to the agent. "I'll take him," she said. "I don't need a worker. I need a son."

She had 40 acres and a sod house. She taught Thomas to read using Sears catalogs. Taught him to farm by letting the crop fail the first year and saying, "We'll do better next time." When the neighbors said, "That boy's not your blood," she said, "Neither was Moses."

Thomas graduated 8th grade — only kid in the county that year. In 1918 he enlisted. Wrote her every week from France. He made it home. Farmed her land until 1976.

He kept the tag. It’s framed in the Kearney Museum. Pencil note on back, in Mrs. O'Malley's hand: "Strong enough for me."

That’s how the West was won — not by outlaws, but by widows who chose family over blood and 8-year-old boys who grew into the name they were given.