Family Notes

 We're still looking at Thomas Pittman, my 2nd great grandfather. Early in 1850 his wife Rebecca died from typhoid fever. Her 4 month old boy, Thomas, also died around that same time (cause unknown, according to the Census).  Aside: the nine-page "Mortality Schedule" for Monroe County, Ohio, 1850, is full of interesting commentary by the Census taker. Each page contains his remarks concerning the quality of the soil (limestone or clay or black loam) and the types of timber present in the area. On page 5 he mentions the "almost entire failure" of the previous year's wheat crop, it having been struck with rust. On page 8 of this listing of deaths he records this strange comment: "Perhaps the most interesting phenomena I can record is if I may judge from the number of children enumerated this must be a fruitful soil." Cause of death on most often old age, consumption, whooping cough, typhoid, croup, among others. On the bottom of page 9 we have the fo...

 Thomas Pittman, son of William Elias, was born in 1809 at Licking Creek, Pennsylvania, and died 84 years later near Gnaw Bone, Indiana. His father took the family to Monroe County, Ohio, somewhere around 1820. Monroe County had only just been organized in 1815, and in the 1820 census it has just 4,645 people. Monroe County is about 210 miles due west of Licking Creek. Licking Creek was in Bedford County at that time, and in the same 1820 census Bedford County had over 20,000 people. Perhaps the Pittmans were something like the Boones, and wanted only to go where they were no longer in sight of another man's chimney smoke.  The road they would have taken might well have been the famed National Road . Construction had begun in 1811, following part of the old Braddock trail to Pittsburgh. By 1818 it had been completed to Wheeling (about 50 miles north of Monroe County). In Green township the Pittman Family, William Elias and the children, settled down to farm the land and put do...