While researching my father’s native American ancestry, I had been contacted by a researcher in Minnesota, who had information about my great-grandfather’s first wife. In her correspondence, she referenced a tribal census. I asked her where she got that information, and she told me about how she and her husband had taken a week’s vacation and traveled to Washington DC and spent the week going through the Indian records at the National Archives.
Early on in my genealogy research, I had found a set of our great-great-grandparents, John E. Mark and Dolly Snoke. The burials at Steelstown showed that John had been married previously to a woman named Mary, who died in 1865. When I researched the 1860 census, I discovered that John and Mary had a daughter, Priscilla. In 1870, Priscilla Mark would have been about twelve years old, but I could not find her anywhere on the 1870 census.
My initial research into my mother’s ancestry ended with our great-great-grandfather, Phillip Shaffner, who died in 1920. His burial, as well as that of his wife, Maria Alleman, was listed on the Steelstown EC Church cemetery survey, which I found posted online by Marian Snyder. I visited the cemetery and transcribed his birth and death dates from his gravestone.