When the persons first moved to the area they usually would locate on hillsides because
they didn't know how much the river would rise when the spring thaws came -- they
didn't want to drown or have their homes flooded out. Through the next years they
found out how much the river rose so they knew where to build a house, plus they usually
needed better farmland for their gardens (and farms if they were raising food to sell or
had livestock) and the bottom lands were more fertile from the floods that usually would
occur every 20 or so years); plus it was closer to water for getting this water for
drinking, feeding livestock, bathing, washing clothes, etc. This is probably the reason
your ancestors moved.
Another reason for moving is that they may have started working at some place closer --
remember that they walked most everywhere they went and only the richer persons even had
horses to ride to work, etc.
From maps I saw that about 4miles east is right on location
Judith Sandage Murphy
--- On Wed, 11/18/09, ingibson-request(a)rootsweb.com <ingibson-request(a)rootsweb.com>
wrote:
From: ingibson-request(a)rootsweb.com <ingibson-request(a)rootsweb.com>
Subject: INGIBSON Digest, Vol 4, Issue 7
To: ingibson(a)rootsweb.com
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 3:00 AM
Today's Topics:
1. White Oak Hills (Christopher Doyle)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 02:52:16 -0800 (PST)
From: Christopher Doyle <doyle_cm(a)yahoo.com>
Subject: [INGIBSON] White Oak Hills
To: INGIBSON(a)rootsweb.com
Message-ID: <3120.41046.qm(a)web51410.mail.re2.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
My third great-grandmother, Berilla (Greek) Mills, wrote a partial family history for the
Gil R. Stormont county history. A distant cousin recently sent me Berilla's paper
which only contains a few more details about the family. One thing that's always
intrigued me about the story is why James and Rachael (Courson) Mills first settled on
high ground, identified as 800 acres in "White Oak Hills," but then took
"Congress lands in the Patoka River bottoms" where they contracted milk
sickness.
?
I have yet to identify just where White Oak Hills was located in the 1820's. Berilla
says it was 4 miles east of Princeton. Does anyone on the list have better information?
?
Chris Doyle
Indy?
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