Surprising Ohio!

OK, so my stereotype of Ohio was a large industrialized area around the Great Lakes and flat land everywhere else.  Not so!  We are, once again, in a very pretty RV Park on a hill about 10 miles south of Canton and 50 miles south of Cleveland.  The entire east side of the state that we’ve been in is hilly with leaves that are still really brilliant in places.  Also, immediately east of here is the largest concentration of Amish and Mennonites in the United States (not in the Amish country of Pennsylvania where all the tourism is!).  Kent State University (where National Guard members shot student Vietnam war protestors) is also quite close by. 

I have tons of genealogy here (Butler, Morgan, Halley, Shamblin, Nodle) and several of these were “brick walls” for me.   Three of these (Halley, Shamblin, Nodle) dead-ended in Ohio in the early/mid 1800’s.  For those of you who aren’t into/don’t do genealogy, try researching the “Nodle” family:  the name can be spelled:  Nodle, Noodle, Noddle, Knodle, Knoodle, Knoddle, Gnodle, Gnoodle, Gnoddle, and I’m sure a bunch of other ways………..what can I say, it’s German.  Luckily for me, Stark County (Canton) has one of the best genealogical resources I've seen.  This allowed me to push my "Nodle's" back another generation and led us to this beautiful, isolated family cemetery now inside a state park.

 We did spend quite a bit of time driving around the various counties that my ancestors lived in.  We were consistently amazed at how hilly, how beautiful, and how very, very rural the area is.  Even today, we drove 20 miles off the only major road to get to a the county seat of one of these counties.  The town was very small (about 2,000 people) and completely isolated from any town of any size whatsoever.  The Amish country is full of pretty farms and buggies of every possible kind.

Pat and I love old buildings.  Don't get me wrong, there are some newer buildings I'm very fond of; but old buildings just have so much character and you can almost see, hear, smell, sense, all the history that has happened within there walls.  I also managed to push my Halley line back by two generations in one of them.  Just look at the insides of two of these county courthouses!

Morgan County, Ohio

Wayne County, Ohio

And, when was the last time a building was built that looked like this?

Morgan County, Ohio

After several days in Canton and focused on my genealogy, we headed to southwest Ohio where Pat has family  history.  This area was more like my stereotype, flatter than eastern Ohio; but still not as flat as we expected (although the town where Pat's family is from has been hit by two big tornadoes in recent history!).  Once again, we were in a great campground where we were practically the only people (it's November in the mid-west!).  Pat got to stomp around cemeteries and do research looking for his ancestors for a couple of days.