Sarah Gurley and her origins have stubbornly remained buried in the dust of the past. She has resisted the head-on search method of shaking all the records that might contain her name. She has resisted the backdoor method, searching our DNA connections. We are stuck. Sarah G's origins continue to elude us.
To solve this mystery the Search Sisters decide to go sideways.We aim to meet the people that surrounded our people. To do this we must build the village of Greencastle, Pennsylvania 1855 and populate it with FANS (the friends and neighbors of Sarah G).
We review the names on our Allison tree to locate aunts, uncles, cousins. We find McLanahans, Boggs, Johnstons. Wilkins. We consider the contemporaries of Sarah Gurley Allison and her children John R. Allison and Mary Louisa Allison. The employer: George Ziegler. The blacksmith: Charles Hartman. The medic: Doctor Boggs.
We dig up maps of Franklin County. We discover the county shifts: Franklin was once Lancaster. It was also Cumberland. Before that it was Chester. We peer at the tangled geography of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. We study the roads. We trace creeks and rivers.
We look at the muster rolls containing the names of the soldiers of Franklin County. We read about of the war of 1812. (What was THAT war about?). So many questions....
We stalk the library and the internet archives to read the history of Presbyterian churches in the Cumberland Valley. We locate the cemeteries. We collect images. We find portraits and attach them to the family tree.
We build a separate tree called Antrim Greencastle tree that includes everyone in the village for 100 years: McLanahans, Boggs, Johnstons, Wilkins, and Allisons.
Still no kin of Sarah G. Where, oh where, can her clan be?
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