Tuscarawas County Genealogical Society

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Tuscarawas County Genealogical Society Non-lending genealogical and historical library and archives. Closed Saturday before Labor Day and Thanksgiving weekend. Library closes for the winter.

The Tuscarawas County Genealogical Society is currently open the 1st, 3rd, and 5th Tuesdays of the month and every Thursday and Saturday from 11:00 to 3:00. For additional information please go to our website Tuscogene.com.

09/04/2026

Some people can name all 8 of their great grandparents and some didn’t even realize they had eight great grandparents. 😂 What’s your family knowledge score? Here’s a fun way to find out! Share your SCORE in the comments!

09/02/2026

If your family tree reaches back to colonial America, the work of Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck may help you uncover an ancestor’s story. 📖

One of the most respected genealogists of the 20th century, Bockstruck spent decades helping researchers navigate early American records. He managed the genealogy department at the Dallas Public Library, taught at conferences across the country, served as registrar for several lineage societies, and compiled extensive records of 17th- and 18th-century soldiers and militia members.

His first book, *Virginia’s Colonial Soldiers*, brought together names scattered across books, periodicals, archives, and thousands of manuscript pages in the United States and England. It remains an important resource for anyone researching military service in colonial Virginia.

📖 Learn more about *Virginia’s Colonial Soldiers*:
https://genealogical.com/store/virginias-colonial-soldiers/

Bockstruck went on to publish valuable works covering colonial naturalizations, bounty and donation land grants, Revolutionary War pension records, early American naming practices, and more. If your ancestors lived in North America before 1800, there is a good chance one of his books could point you toward your next discovery.

Explore Lloyd DeWitt Bockstruck’s publications:
https://genealogical.com/store/?gpc_search=1&textinput_author_last_name=Bockstruck

08/30/2026

Can you help this person?

Karen Peterson
Assign this conversation
Thu 1:58 PM
Karen Peterson
Can you post this on Facebook?

🔎 HELP NEEDED: Looking for George Washington Murray

I’m hoping some of the wonderful researchers in Tuscarawas County can help me solve a family mystery that has been challenging me for quite some time.

I am searching for my 3rd great-grandfather, George Washington Murray.

Here is what I know:

* George Washington Murray
* Reportedly born October 24, 1836, in Ohio
* Married Levina (also spelled Levina/Lovina/Lovinah) S***z on August 10, 1855
* Levina was the daughter of William S***z and Deborah Gordon S***z of Tuscarawas County.
* Their son, Cyrus Worthington/Washington Murray, was born June 8, 1856, in Tuscarawas County, Ohio.
* Their daughter, Ida, was born June 27, 1861.
* George reportedly died December 11, 1861 or 1862, possibly in an explosives accident while working.
* After George’s death, Levina married William James Reed in Iowa in September 1863.

I have searched FamilySearch, Ancestry, Fold3, census records, probate records and other sources, but I have not yet been able to establish who George’s parents were or exactly where he was born and died.

One particularly interesting clue:

Deborah S***z’s 1861 will names her daughter as “Lovinah Murray” and leaves her $800. This confirms that Levina was using the Murray surname by January 1861.

I have also found several Murray families in Ohio, including Tuscarawas County, but I am trying very hard not to attach my George to the wrong Murray family simply because the name and dates appear to fit.

🧬 What I’m hoping to find:

Does anyone have information about:

* A George/George W./George Washington Murray, born about 1835–1838, in Tuscarawas County or surrounding counties?
* Murray families living in Tuscarawas County in the 1830s–1860s
* A Murray family with a son named George who may have been born about 1836
* The August 10, 1855 marriage of George Murray and Levina S***z
* An 1861–1862 newspaper report of a George Murray dying in an explosion or explosives accident
* Any probate, land, cemetery, church or court records that might identify George’s parents

I would be extremely grateful for any suggestions, records, family files, or clues. Even something that ultimately proves to be the wrong George would be helpful because I’m trying to eliminate the possibilities one by one.

Thank you so much for any help! ❤️

I’m especially hoping someone familiar with the Tuscarawas County records might recognize this family.

07/31/2026

Don’t forget about the next meeting at 10 a.m. Tuesday Sep 1 at the society library in Dennison.

07/25/2026

The summer issues of the Ohio Genealogy News and the Ohio Genealogical Society Quarterly are now available to OGS Members on the OGS website at: https://www.ogs.org/resource_type/periodicals/. The most recent issues of the OGN and OGSQ are always the first two resources listed.

07/23/2026

The loss of the 1890 U.S. Census is one of the biggest frustrations in American genealogy. Just when you're hoping to track an ancestor between 1880 and 1900, there's... nothing.

Or is there?

While the census itself is almost entirely gone, that doesn't mean your research has to stop. There are plenty of other records that can help place your ancestors in a specific place and time, reveal family relationships, and provide the clues you need to keep moving forward. City directories, state censuses, tax lists, newspapers, church records, land records, and even the surviving fragments of the 1890 census can all help bridge that twenty-year gap.

I've put together a blog post that walks through 8 sources you can use to fill the gap and explains how each one can strengthen your research.

Read it here: https://www.amyjohnsoncrow.com/8-sources-to-fill-the-1890-census-gap/

07/20/2026

Sierra Green, Archivist for the Heinz History Center, will be presenting for GSP virtually this Thursday, July 16 at 7 p.m. ET on "An Archivist’s Guide to Genealogical Research at the Heinz History Center". The live event is FREE to all. GSP members will have access to the recording until Sept. 14, 2026. For registration and more information go to: https://genpa.org/programs-and-events/

07/03/2026

Don’t forget about the next meeting at 10 a.m. July 11 at the society library in Dennison.

07/02/2026

Long before any government kept track of births, the answer to who your people were sat in a single book in the parish kirk. 📖

For tracing Scottish roots, few records are as precious or as humbling as the Old Parish Registers, the handwritten volumes kept by the Church of Scotland to record baptisms, marriages and burials. Some reach back to the 1500s, though many begin later, and they were the only record of ordinary lives long before the state began registering births in 1855.

Turning their pages is a strange and moving thing. 🌿 You read a minister's looping ink noting that a child was baptised on a winter Sunday three hundred years ago, the parents named, sometimes a witness or two, and suddenly an ancestor who was only a blank space becomes a real family standing in a cold kirk with a baby in their arms.

They are not perfect records. Spelling wandered, some years are missing, and the poorest families sometimes slipped through the net entirely. 🕯️ But for countless people the world over, an Old Parish Register entry is the furthest back the paper trail goes, the last solid footprint before the mist closes in. To find your own name in one is to touch the very edge of what can be known.

What makes them so powerful is that they were never meant for us. They were the quiet bookkeeping of a parish going about its life, and yet across the centuries they became a bridge, carrying the names of the forgotten down to the descendants who would one day come looking. 💚

Somewhere in an old kirk book, your family is still waiting to be read.

Address

307 Center Street
Dennison, OH
44621

Telephone

+17409220531

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