St. Omer "area" facebook page
by Phyllis Miller Fleming
from Sharon Pearce:
> I have opened a Facebook page titled:
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> www.facebook.com/#!/InstomerPioneers.
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> Giving it the name of St. Omer, IN Pioneers, but really it is to focus on discussion of the settlement and development of the tri-county area of Adams Township, Decatur Co., southern Orange Twp. of Rush Co., and eastern Shelbyville around Middletown and Waldron, plus the area of Blue Ridge (Cynthiana), and what may be considered continuity of those settlers to today, especially as to the importance of the Michigan Road to them and what it meant to carve their farms, cabins and houses out of the woods.
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> Perhaps descendants of the Yorker settlers (the Finger Lakes of New York, earlier from New Jersey), especially those who migrated over from Hamilton Co. in southwest Ohio, as well as those pioneers who came up from the Ohio and through Kentucky, coming into this newly opened land about 1820, and the Native Americans who camped at what became St. Omer will Like this page. Some of these pioneers had kin in Fayette, Franklin and Union Counties, as well, for they were part of a larger migration from the middle colonies, part of the American stream, but important in their stopping in southwest Ohio and eastern Indiana.
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> I am hopeful it will also be a page for sharing stories about the cemeteries and churches, education, farms, mills, militia and newspapers. Any comments that further increase understanding of the feelings and intentions of the settler folk on any topic.
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> Newspapers for this area prior to the War Between the States are few and far between in state archives. Those publications tended to focus on farming and trade, county gov. issues, and taxes, plus notices of meetings, including militia meetings, which seems to have served a large part of their lives from my research, but did not contain much of a personal nature. They seemed to know what Washington was doing. Dialoguing on this history may enrich those of us interested in what happened in the steps along the way, especially between 1820 and the Civil War, and the period of the 1880s and ‘90s, which saw the passing of the first wave.
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> I hope you will share this with your genealogical contacts and friends interested in history and perhaps this local history, and encourage them to “Like” it. I understand that when one has received 30 “Likes,” this opens the Admin of it to more options.
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> Please share books, films, photos and other items of interest that you feel pertain to the topic, and related information of today. There is development along that Road today that cannot but give an historian pause, and perhaps a sense of poetic justice in that one of the current businesses near the intersection of the three counties is “Love’s” truck stop, a breathing place to reconnoiter.
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> I hope to have the photos I took on my visit there last September attachable soon with voice overs. Hope to hear from you about this page, and any ideas you may have for it.
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> Pearce
> I attempted to address you as bccs; new Yahoo system - couldn't do it. Always somethings!
> Best wishes for an improved society,
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> Sharon Pearce, sharpearce(a)yahoo.com
P
To God be the glory, Amen!