I just got the following note from my friend, Bill Lee. He and his wife, LaVonne, may hold the genealogical record for having visited and extracted data from county courthouses.
I just finished uploading the last bunch of the updates to my home-grown family history website, http://oswaldrelations.com/, to my host. The material in this website has been gathered by LaVonne and myself over the last forty years of on-site courthouse research in more than 1,000 county courthouses throughout the United States, visits to countless cemeteries and many libraries. These adventures have resulted in 37 copyrighted books dealing with abstracts of courthouse records, and most recently the above mentioned website. Also included in my sources are the results of a number of creditable family history researchers I have had the privilege of collaborating with over the years.
In recent years I have been able to add to and verify my information by using computer websites, most notably, FindAGrave.com, death records in some states and the Social Security Death Index, although the latter was available at libraries for the last several years. I have so much information from our research that I have not used any of the popular genealogy websites like Ancestry.com or Genealogy.com. Perhaps I will use one of them if I ever exhaust all the information I have at hand from my many years of research.
The above mentioned website has 21,657 names in its drop down index plus, probably that many again, names in biographical information in text form for those in the index. Also included are more than 2,000 photos. Many of these are courtesy of family members along with those from my own immediate family. Also included are photos of cemetery memorials from some of the cemeteries we have visited.
The primary names in my extended family are Harrison, Harter, Jenkins, Nowlin, Oliver, Oswald, Powell, Shelley, Thomson and Zumwalt. In some cases eight or more generations are included, almost all just in the United States. In only a few instances are anything outside the U S mentioned, except in the case of the original immigrant.
Check out OswaldRelations.com.
