[Music] For people connecting the dots in the lineage of their own family, local historical societies and museums can help do more than fill in a blank on a family tree.

They can provide the details and research that enrich the stories of a family's past.

[Music] Cottonwood Ranch Historic Site, the home base of Cottonwood Connections, was the home of Fenton and Jenny Place Pratt, who followed Fenton's father, Abraham Pratt, in immigrating to Kansas from England.

Fenton and Jenny's great-granddaughter, Michelle Campbell, recently visited Cottonwood Ranch to both connect with her family's history and share more artifacts with Don Rolison that further fill in the story of the Pratt family.

We have the privilege of having Michelle Campbell here, who is a great-granddaughter.

John Fenton Pratt and Jenny Place Pratt and granddaughter of Elsie Pratt.

She has brought us some things that are very interesting.

She found some more documents and she has been a big contributor and donator for the Friends of Cottonwood Ranch.

And the first thing you showed me were the ballerinas.

Can you explain a little bit about those?

They are ballerina music boxes that had come from the Cottonwood Ranch and they belonged to my aunt Hilda and my grandmother Elsie.

You also talked about having some letters between your grandmother Elsie and your grandfather Clarence Johnson.

Basically, because I had already given you some letters that my grandmother had written to Clarence.

I came across these letters in which grandfather had written to grandmother.

It was a 10-year courtship that my grandmother and grandfather had.

Some of these are the letters that they were corresponding to each other as maybe grandfather was working up the nerve to finally pop the question.

Get all those waterfowl in alignment.

Yes, exactly.

But you also have some legal stuff, in fact some of the Homestead papers and stuff that you have.

Yes.

And have come across basically the various deeds, naturalization paperwork, just various documents as it relates to the Cottonwood Ranch.

Some of that was Abraham's.

It's Abraham's, yes.

He had no record of some of his stuff.

Yes, and some of it was when he passed the correspondence with his sisters back in England.

So it's going to be interesting going through this and seeing what sort of analysis I can do.

And we really appreciate you giving these to the Friends of Cottonwood Ranch.

Yes, the way I look at it is to keep the documents preserved for, like you said, the history and preservation of the Cottonwood Ranch and maybe fill in some holes for information and stuff.

Well, it will.

And this is also Sheridan County history, so that's valuable for the Sheridan County Historical Society too.

So there could be a lot of good and a lot of connections out of these.

We'll get more of the story.

So did you read some of these, I'm sure?

Did you get any information on the genealogy too much?

Because you have, I know, Abraham Pratt's birth certificate in here.

Yes.

Notice of his birth.

His baptism.

His baptism.

His baptismal papers from England found that my mother kept was Clarence and Elsie's marriage information.

So found out that my grandfather and grandmother were married in Morland.

You know, I always thought it was in Manhattan.

I thought your mother told me in Studley.

Yes.

And so finding this and looking at it, it's like, oh, Morland, I just drove right by Moreland and turned off for Morland.

So this is a real treasure trove of getting more into the personal lives.

Just looking at a few of them, my grandfather seemed like was a jokester, kind of.

He was, you know, kind of was always that way.

Me knowing him as my grandfather and just reading one letter, I know she was very supportive of him when he was venturing out and trying to raise chickens and cattle and pigs and different things like that.

And I think when she was responding to one of his letters saying things weren't going that great.

And so she was kind of pumping him up, you know, and telling him, you know, got to keep working hard towards this, towards your goals.

You know, and I had that same sense reading my grandparents letters.

And I found out there were people just like teenagers, just like anybody else.

Yeah.

Joking.

I know my grandfather he was homesteading out in Eastern Colorado.

and had written back and they were planning on getting married.

She didn't want to live in a mud house, meaning a sod house.

But he said they had a new dishwasher out there because it was a bunch of bachelors and they got a new dog and they were setting plates out along the side of the wall so the dogs can lick them off.

But he led her on in there.

Yes.

But yeah, you keep doing things.

I was doing some research for somebody else the other day and found out that my great grandfather or his house where he homesteaded.

I guess I never asked for it for my great-grandfather homesteaded.

But it was on a 1906 Sheridan County Atlas And it, "I'll be darned."

I didn't know he lived there.

Yeah.

And mostly what I have on some of the information here at the Conwood Ranch is oral history.

It's kind of like reading history, too.

You want to collect as much as that as you can and remember it and kind of take the average because everybody has a different interpretation of what they saw that day.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Where these letters and things will be a little more concrete.

It will be very revealing.

So it and like I said, when you're young, you don't really think about what happened.

Where you came from or anything.

And as you get older, it seems like it becomes more important.

And then you're sitting here wishing like, I wish I had talked to my mom more about this or my grandparents or learned more and paid attention more.

For those like Michelle who continue to search for connections, local historical societies can be a big help.

Today we're going to visit with Karen Lewis, the director of the Sheridan County Historical Society.

The Sheridan County Historical Society has done a lot of work on genealogy.

There's a lot of local histories, county histories throughout the state, but they really went and did one a bit different and had family members that came out here early on.

And so they have two volumes written by the local people that have been compiled into these.

And so the genealogy really starts here.

And they're all cross indexed, too.

Yes.

So there is all easy to find all the information you want in the back.

As John said, they're just full of family history information.

They're all alphabetized.

So even if your name is just mentioned somewhere on a page, it's here.

We just used it this morning again.

It's a wealth of information.

But there's other ways to do it.

Some libraries have it.

But for instance, here's a standard atlas of Sheridan County, Kansas of nineteen six, nineteen seven.

These are good documents, too, because it has the landowners and where they lived.

And then also it has people that lived here.

So there's portraits of the people that lived in the area.

There's a couple of pages of that.

So it's really handy to be able to utilize this not only as land records, but also for people records.

And it also tells on a couple of pages what these people did at that time, too.

And then a few years ago, the Sheridan County Historical Society did the earliest recorded landowners of Sheridan County.

And this is a document that is a lifesaver on a lot of stuff because it not only has the maps and the tracks of land they did, but whether it was a timber claim, a preemption, purchase from the railroad or a homestead.

This is one of our best selling books, actually, because it goes by sections.

And so it has all the names of all the people, earliest land records.

And so this gives you a clue on who was here sometimes, because there's so many people that moved in here to homestead and then moved out.

And those names of those people are long forgotten because there are no descendants around here.

If someone comes in, they're looking for family history, we ask for, of course, a name, and they might just have a first name or a last name.

Some of the records we have, we might have death records, marriage records, obituaries, cemetery records.

We've got a vast collection of military records that go clear back to the Civil War.

We have school records, teacher records, newspapers.

Like I said, we have them all digitized, too.

And one thing people forget about is church records, too.

Diaries.

We have collections of people's diaries, also.

Letters and interviews.

You have to wade through a lot of this stuff, but Karen and the staff at the Sheridan County Historical Society help you guide you through all of this.

We've had people come here several years ago that came here.

They were part of the Freeman family, and they had never met before, but they had hired a professional genealogist to do their family trees and stuff, and they hooked them together finally.

And so they met here for the first time in this building.

So, and we got pictures and everything.

It was just a very uplifting experience.

It gives us goosebumps sometimes to get to hear these kind of wonderful stories, and we still keep in touch with them.

Well, that's kind of incentive to you to keep following up on this stuff, because there's always rewards of finding who these people are, who was here and where they went.

And all that, as you said, why did they come here, and then why did they go?

A couple years ago, we had a gentleman that came in from California, and it was quite the story that he had, because his grandfather had ran away from home when he was like 12 or 14 years old, and he had even changed his name.

So, they finally figured it out.

So he traced the roots back to here, and so I was going through like school pictures and the area pictures, and actually we, in a school picture with students, we found a picture of his grandfather.

He's like, I know that, that's him.

And so that was, I mean, so now he comes back every year from California, and he brought his brother with him this last year.

And it's just rather cool to find that connection, and he's part of the Mowery family then too.

So he tries to make it here for their family reunion.

The state historical society is good for genealogy also, but the county stuff, you just aren't a name in a book.

You're a name in a book that people knew, and they preserved the information from it.

So it's a family preservation, or family history preservation, and it isn't just a name.

Family connections are a major part of the history of Nicodemus, Kansas, which celebrates that heritage in its annual Homecoming and Emancipation Day celebration.

To encourage those connections, the Nicodemus Historical Society provides assistance in genealogical study related to the community.

The descendants of the first settlers of Nicodemus are all over the United States, all over the world.

And when we have our emancipation celebration, they seem to make it a priority to come back.

We've got cousins that live in the Philippines, in Brazil, and my own brother lives in Belgium.

And so coming back for the emancipation celebration to do that reconnection, which is a part of us now, it's in our blood, we choose to do that because we want to maintain those family ties.

And even though one may not know how they're related to one another, you could be a first cousin, a third cousin, a fifth cousin, it doesn't really matter, you're just a cousin.

And so it's important for us to maintain those genealogical relationships with one another.

And when we look at our ancestors that had the vision and the will to come to the West, I mean, and settle out here, I mean, I think that's this absolute phenomenon.

And what courage they had and what strong faith they had in God.

So when I think about that, I think about my great grandmother, Emma, who is pictured here, that's seated there.

Emma was pregnant in 1877 when that first group came.

But if you look at that family, she had the first baby born in Nicodemus.

The first son was Henry.

He was born October the 30th, 1877.

And then her second son was Charles.

That's my grandfather.

So my genealogy goes immediately back to that first family.

And you could take this family and two other, two or three other families and you can get, I would say 95% of Nicodemus.

You're going to get somebody that's a descendant that's related to at least maybe two or three of those families.

And when Nicodemus was established, we were really isolated.

And so people had to start marrying each other, the different families, and then they got down to my generation and they pretty much had to stop marrying everybody because we were all related at that point.

So that makes for a unique situation genealogically.

Sometimes people ask me, well, how are you related to this person?

And I may say, oh, here's an example.

My great aunt is my mother's first cousin, but she's my aunt, great aunt on my dad's side.

So my great uncle Alvin Bates married my mother's first cousin, Ada Williams.

And so that happens a lot.

And then you have two brothers marry two sisters.

That happened probably five or six times.

You got large families, extremely large families.

And all of those kids marrying each other.

It's just a very interesting genealogical pot.

But it's very important for us because it's the glue that holds us all together.

So you have all of these little nuances that are happening after the Civil War is over.

And even during slavery time period, people would name their children after their sisters and brothers to keep track of one another if they got separated from the plantation.

So when you look at those kinds of things culturally, it's very difficult to just pinpoint who someone's ancestor is.

And then there's a lot of oral histories about different families and different people in your family.

And also all of those things are taken into account when you're doing genealogical study within the African-American culture.

And one of the things that we're doing to assist descendants is we created a Nicodemus ancestry resource guide.

And what we're trying to do is assist those who are interested in finding out how they're related to one another or what their genealogy is.

And so we have in here, we've got a list of all the people that we have recorded as being settlers of the people that came between 1877 and 79.

And even after that, trickles of people that came in from different places.

So we're tracing those people.

And another thing that's really exciting and is useful is that people are, because of Ancestry.com and all, people are contacting.

People are contacting us and people are coming here.

So people are reconnecting.

And it's a phenomenal thing because, you know, you'll see a name or I'll see a name that included people that came in 1879.

But I don't know anybody that's associated with them or that name kind of disappears.

But it's interesting right now because we are finding that people are coming out of the woodwork.

Cemeteries and cemetery records are a rich source of understanding history.

Sharleen Wurm and her staff and board at the Decatur County Museum in Oberlin, Kansas lean into this reality to help people make those family connections.

We think cemeteries are very important for genealogy history and to find the stories.

One of the things we're most proud of at our museum is our research room, which specializes in genealogy.

Over the last several years, Sharleen and some of the other staff have digitally scanned in over 19,000 obituaries, which makes it easy to start looking up your loved ones and ancestors.

The first thing we can do is see if we have obituaries, then go to some of our sources such as Find a Grave.

Are they out here in the cemetery?

Our own personal cemetery records.

And we can take them further on into their research.

It's nice to know some of the stories, not just the names, but where we're finding out information that we didn't realize.

We do have a lot of requests from people that live too far away to be able to come here, or they make us if they know we have a lot of information, they do make a special trip to come.

So we show them what we have.

We make copies for them.

I'm a picture person.

I like to know what the person looked like.

And so if we have pictures, then I bring them out to the cemetery and find where their family is buried and maybe some extended family that they have had.

I wasn't originally familiar, so I didn't have have anybody's family connections.

So it's been fun being able to connect with Shelli.

My name is Shelli Fortin.

I was born and raised in Oberlin, Kansas, as well as my husband.

My connection to the cemetery through Charlene is my grandfather's name was Robert Wurm.

And he is a cousin to Charlene's husband.

We've been able to share information and those kind of things.

So it's nice to be able to help people from away, but it's also nice to connect to people that live here in the area also.

I was raised that every memorial weekend that we set that day aside and we used to always go and decorate our family's graves.

And that was instilled in me through my grandparents and my parents.

And so I try to keep up that tradition with decorating my grandparents and my parents, my in-laws, some aunts and uncles and even some friends.

I've been in the business of doing hair for about 40 years and I even a lot of times will decorate some of those people's grave that I was especially close to.

I think it's very important.

I try to take my grandkids with me and tell them stories of my different relatives and their different relatives so that it will instill in them that it will be important to tend to their graves and keep up on the history of their family.

The whole cemetery is history.

Everybody has a story.

Some a little more elaborate or more historical than others.

A lot of those people over on that side were our first business people.

They were the ones that built our buildings down on Main Street.

So many important people, but everyone here, 4,000 some, everyone was important.

The history of the people here in the cemetery can be both interesting, heartbreaking, there's tragedies and there's so many stories to tell here and with the people here in Oberlin.

Some may not have been famous or whatever, but everyone here has a story.

There's just so many things that you can find at a museum, a small museum, especially, you know, you can go and get charts off the internet of somebody's family.

But we have the stories here.

We have the stories that maybe no one else has ever heard, but they're in one of our files somewhere that or in the newspaper articles.

We use newspapers a lot to find those kind of little little tidbits that you might not know about.

But when you start looking at the people and the genealogy and the genealogical connections with people, it's fascinating.

It just is, I mean, one story after enough, it starts to unfold, you know, it's just, even though you may say, oh, I'm not really interested in figuring out who you are.

I want to cross a story that'll that'll that'll bite you and make you want to research a little bit more about who this person is.

I believe it's it's really important to discover what your family history is truly about.

And that's what makes it so nice to go into our museum and be able to look up your genealogy.

Like I say, everyone has a story.

And it's amazing the things that you find out about your relatives that you had no idea.

And to come here physically, it just to me, it helps me connect to to be here in the physical atmosphere of where our family has been laid to.

Knowing your genealogy in some ways, it's it's interesting.

And I know it's important on, you know, my family's side as far as knowing what our history is and where we came from.

And hardships that are great grandparents went through and great, great grandparents went through.

And it's just very interesting to learn this information.