Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Ohio: Family Roots, Foundational Soil | Episode 102

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Ohio: Family Roots, Foundational Soil | Episode 102 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:08
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:12
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 0:22
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:31
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 0:38
  Crista Cowan: I don't know what you know about the War of 1812, but I have learned a whole lot more about the War of 1812 in the last few years because I have a three times great-grandfather all the way back up my paternal line and my family tree, whose name was George Cowan.
• 0:55
  Crista Cowan: Now we've discovered that George Cowan was born in County Down, Ireland, and we don't know exactly when he immigrated to the United States or who he immigrated here with, but sometime in his late 20s or early 30s, when he was still single and unmarried and had no children, he shows up in a list of people in Connecticut who had to register as alien citizens during the War of 1812.
• 1:24
  Crista Cowan: You see, because he was from Ireland, he was technically a citizen connected to the British, and we were still at war with the British.
• 1:36
  Crista Cowan: The Revolutionary War, of course, started officially with our declaration of independence on July 4th, 1776, and it went on for years.
• 1:47
  Crista Cowan: But once we became a new country in the early 1780s and formed our government and started moving forward as a nation, I don't know if we thought we were free and clear, if we thought the British wouldn't come back, but they did.
• 2:03
  Crista Cowan: And so the war of 1812 is really just kind of part two of the Revolutionary War.
• 2:10
  Crista Cowan: And because this three times great-grandfather of mine had recently immigrated from Ireland, he had to register as an alien citizen when the War of 1812 broke out.
• 2:22
  Crista Cowan: Now, I don't know a whole lot about his early years in the United States.
• 2:26
  Crista Cowan: I don't know how he went from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, but at some point he did.
• 2:34
  Crista Cowan: He was a weaver by trade, which makes sense considering where in Ireland he came from.
• 2:40
  Crista Cowan: And from everything I can find, he was a very skilled weaver.
• 2:44
  Crista Cowan: And at some point in the years following his immigration, he met a young girl who was the daughter of immigrants from the same county in Ireland where he was from.
• 2:57
  Crista Cowan: Did he know her parents before?
• 3:00
  Crista Cowan: Did he know their families?
• 3:01
  Crista Cowan: I don't know.
• 3:02
  Crista Cowan: I suspect maybe.
• 3:04
  Crista Cowan: But George Cowan married Jane Kahn and they decided to settle in a little place just west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, um, and raise their family.
• 3:16
  Crista Cowan: Now, if you've ever looked at a map, not just a map from today, but a map that shows the boundary changes of counties and states over time.
• 3:29
  Crista Cowan: Could you just nerd out with me for a little bit?
• 3:32
  Crista Cowan: I love maps.
• 3:35
  Crista Cowan: I always have, but I love a good county boundary change map more than anything.
• 3:41
  Crista Cowan: One of my favorite websites is a website called mapofus.org.
• 3:47
  Crista Cowan: It looks like mapofus, mapofus.org, and they have county boundary change maps.
• 3:54
  Crista Cowan: And one of the things that you'll notice when you start looking at the states from Pennsylvania West is that it was just this big territory for a really long time.
• 4:06
  Crista Cowan: And that the boundaries of both the states and the counties were really, really fluid over that period of time.
• 4:16
  Crista Cowan: From the early 1800s, from the late 1700s, all the way through the Civil War and a little bit even after the Civil War.
• 4:26
  Crista Cowan: So George and Jane had to settle in this little spot of land west of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that for a time was part of the Ohio Territory.
• 4:39
  Crista Cowan: And then they lived in Pennsylvania State proper, and then they lived in Virginia, and then they moved over to Steubenville, Ohio, and then they moved back to Virginia.
• 4:49
  Crista Cowan: But then at some point, that little spit of land that pops up in between Pennsylvania and Ohio became West Virginia.
• 4:58
  Crista Cowan: And really, they never moved more than 20 miles.
• 5:02
  Crista Cowan: But because of the changing boundaries of states and counties around them, it looks like they lived in a lot of places.
• 5:10
  Crista Cowan: Really, they lived in that same region.
• 5:12
  Crista Cowan: And while they lived there, George continued his occupation as a weaver.
• 5:19
  Crista Cowan: But what is unusual about the family of George and Jane is that they, all 13 of their children, lived to adulthood.
• 5:44
  Crista Cowan: And that is pretty rare for the time.
• 5:47
  Crista Cowan: So these were healthy, hardy people.
• 5:50
  Crista Cowan: And that also means that George likely made enough of a living to care for them.
• 5:56
  Crista Cowan: Nobody was dying from malnutrition or conditions that might lead to illness.
• 6:02
  Crista Cowan: Like that was a that was a big deal.
• 6:05
  Crista Cowan: So all 13 of these children are raised in the area of the country between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Steubenville, Ohio.
• 6:16
  Crista Cowan: Now, Jane's family also lived in the area.
• 6:18
  Crista Cowan: And for a really long time, I didn't think any of George's family did.
• 6:24
  Crista Cowan: He's been a brick wall in our family tree for years.
• 6:29
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, it wasn't until we started researching all of his children and eventually his grandchildren that we even knew anything more about where he came from, other than Ireland.
• 6:43
  Crista Cowan: He shows up as a non-citizen in early census records.
• 6:47
  Crista Cowan: So as far as we could tell, he never naturalized.
• 6:50
  Crista Cowan: He signs as a British citizen when he registers as an alien in the War of 1812 list.
• 6:57
  Crista Cowan: Every census just lists him as born in Ireland.
• 7:01
  Crista Cowan: All the censuses for his children just list him as born in Ireland.
• 7:06
  Crista Cowan: But one day I found a little local history.
• 7:10
  Crista Cowan: Now, if you don't know about family and local history books, they are one of my favorite resources because they oftentimes include little snippets of biographies of the founding individuals or families or prominent people in communities.
• 7:27
  Crista Cowan: And these books, many of them, were written between 1876 and 1976.
• 7:35
  Crista Cowan: And the reason they were written was because in 1876, the US government put out a request for the hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
• 7:48
  Crista Cowan: They wanted the communities across the country to write a local history about how their community was founded.
• 7:58
  Crista Cowan: And many communities responded to that call.
• 8:01
  Crista Cowan: And those books were submitted to the Library of Congress.
• 8:04
  Crista Cowan: They were published and disseminated across the country as a history of the communities throughout the United States.
• 8:12
  Crista Cowan: Well, a lot of communities didn't participate in that, but in the ensuing decades, they eventually did.
• 8:19
  Crista Cowan: And so what you see is starting in 1876, going through about 1920 or 1930, you see this huge influx of these community histories, local histories being published.
• 8:32
  Crista Cowan: And then in the run-up to 1976, when we were getting ready to celebrate the 200th anniversary of our country, a bunch of other communities who hadn't participated in the first two rounds decided that they wanted to get their books published as well.
• 8:49
  Crista Cowan: And so you see a little flurry of some additional local histories being published in the mid-1970s.
• 8:56
  Crista Cowan: So these local history books published over the course of those hundred years have made their way, many of them, onto Ancestry.
• 9:07
  Crista Cowan: And they've been digitized.
• 9:08
  Crista Cowan: And as a matter of fact, they're now full text searchable, which is kind of exciting.
• 9:12
  Crista Cowan: But back when I first found this little book from this little community in Iowa that mentioned one of the grandsons of George and Jane by name.
• 9:26
  Crista Cowan: And it listed that his grandfather had come from County Down, Ireland.
• 9:34
  Crista Cowan: And to this day, that is the only specific Irish location that I've been able to find any mention of in any records of George or Jane or their children or their grandchildren.
• 9:50
  Crista Cowan: So I know where George comes from because of one of those little local histories.
• 9:55
  Crista Cowan: But I've learned some things about George and Jane and who they were as parents because I did a deep dive into the lives of their 13 children.
• 10:08
  Crista Cowan: Now I could probably tell you all sorts of stories about those 13 children.
• 10:14
  Crista Cowan: I'm only going to share with you three today.
• 10:17
  Crista Cowan: George and Jane are my three times great-grandparents.
• 10:22
  Crista Cowan: My two times great-grandfather is one of their children.
• 10:25
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, I pulled it up so that I could look at it and make sure that I get it correct.
• 10:31
  Crista Cowan: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
• 10:36
  Crista Cowan: He is child number nine out of 13.
• 10:39
  Crista Cowan: He was born in 1833, and his name is Robert Watson Cowan.
• 10:45
  Crista Cowan: Now here's the weird thing.
• 10:47
  Crista Cowan: There's nobody in the family with the last name of Watson.
• 10:51
  Crista Cowan: So for a really long time, I wondered why did Robert have the middle name Watson?
• 10:57
  Crista Cowan: Well, he has an older brother.
• 11:00
  Crista Cowan: One, two, three, four.
• 11:02
  Crista Cowan: Child number four.
• 11:03
  Crista Cowan: So child number four and child number nine.
• 11:06
  Crista Cowan: Child number nine, my great-great-grandfather.
• 11:10
  Crista Cowan: Child number four is a son named Jacob Pitzer Cowan.
• 11:17
  Crista Cowan: There's no Pitzers in the family either.
• 11:21
  Crista Cowan: So why on earth were these boys being given these names?
• 11:26
  Crista Cowan: It was something that puzzled me for a really long time.
• 11:29
  Crista Cowan: Well, we had a little family story that Roberts, my two times great-grandfather, had been a saddle maker during the Civil War, and that he had worked for one of his uncles.
• 11:44
  Crista Cowan: And so I went digging into records.
• 11:47
  Crista Cowan: And here's what I found.
• 11:48
  Crista Cowan: This young man, born in about 1833, in uh in that little spit of land east of Pittsburgh as you head towards Steubenville, Ohio, had moved into Steubenville, Ohio during the Civil War.
• 12:05
  Crista Cowan: Now he was in his 30s.
• 12:07
  Crista Cowan: He could have joined the war effort, but he had a unique and particular skill at which he was very, very talented, which was saddle making.
• 12:20
  Crista Cowan: And they needed saddles for the war effort.
• 12:24
  Crista Cowan: And he had an uncle who had a shop in Steubenville where he was able to then go in and grow the business, get enough of a supply chain going that they could provide those saddles for the army during the during the war.
• 12:43
  Crista Cowan: And so he didn't enlist because he was helping his uncle run that business.
• 12:49
  Crista Cowan: That meant that he was now firmly entrenched in the state of Ohio.
• 12:54
  Crista Cowan: And so even though his family was his parents and his siblings, a lot of them were still living in that little spit of land in West Virginia at the time.
• 13:02
  Crista Cowan: It became West Virginia, of course, because of the sentiments around the Civil War.
• 13:09
  Crista Cowan: Um, he decided to stay in Ohio.
• 13:13
  Crista Cowan: Several of his brothers also started moving to Ohio.
• 13:18
  Crista Cowan: They moved into Steubenville, and then a couple of them moved to a little town called Ashland.
• 13:26
  Crista Cowan: Now, Ashland, Ohio is in the middle of the state.
• 13:28
  Crista Cowan: The first time I went to Ashland, I had been in Toledo on a business trip.
• 13:34
  Crista Cowan: And I looked it up and realized that Ashland was only about a little over a hundred miles away from Toledo.
• 13:41
  Crista Cowan: So I rented a car, I stayed an extra day and a half, and I drove to Ashland because I knew I had family history there.
• 13:51
  Crista Cowan: Now, of course, this was in the mid-90s.
• 13:55
  Crista Cowan: So just a couple of years before Ancestry came online, I didn't have the resources readily available to me at my fingertips.
• 14:03
  Crista Cowan: But I had done just enough research at the family history library, just enough research in some of the early online message boards that I knew that there was information available in Ashland.
• 14:17
  Crista Cowan: And so as I drove into town that first time, my first stop was going to be at the Historical Society.
• 14:26
  Crista Cowan: And as I walked into the Historical Society, a lovely gentleman there asked me my name and I told him, I said, My name's Krista Cowen.
• 14:39
  Crista Cowan: And he said, Are you related to John Cowen?
• 14:42
  Crista Cowan: And I said, I don't have any brothers or father named John Cowan.
• 14:46
  Crista Cowan: And he goes, No.
• 14:47
  Crista Cowan: Are you related to Dr.
• 14:49
  Crista Cowan: John Cowen?
• 14:50
  Crista Cowan: And I said, I don't know who Dr.
• 14:52
  Crista Cowan: John Cowan is.
• 14:53
  Crista Cowan: And he said, Well, this is his house.
• 14:56
  Crista Cowan: And I said, Oh, well, then I might be related because a lot of my great-great-grandfather Robert's family ended up here in Ashland.
• 15:07
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, he died here in Ashland because he had family living here.
• 15:12
  Crista Cowan: And so he moved here for the end of his life.
• 15:15
  Crista Cowan: And as we looked it up, we realized that John was one of those 13 children in the family of George and Jane.
• 15:23
  Crista Cowan: And at the time, I didn't know anything about John or his life or his family or why he ended up in Ashland.
• 15:32
  Crista Cowan: And what I came to learn that day in the Historical Society that was in the home that John built a century, almost a century and a half, maybe earlier, was that John had gone to medical school and he had moved to Ashland to be the town doctor.
• 15:52
  Crista Cowan: And not only was he the town doctor, but he had also set up a pharmacy in the town.
• 15:58
  Crista Cowan: And he and his wife had had a whole family of daughters.
• 16:04
  Crista Cowan: And while he was serving as the town physician and running the town pharmacy and raising this family of daughters, he had also been part of the state legislature.
• 16:17
  Crista Cowan: So this was a group, a man who had become educated, gotten involved in his community, and unfortunately, towards the end of his life when he was in his late 60s, we're not sure exactly what happened.
• 16:32
  Crista Cowan: We know he started drinking heavily.
• 16:35
  Crista Cowan: And one day he walked into the pharmacy and he uh took some morphine.
• 16:41
  Crista Cowan: And we don't know if it was to for a pain.
• 16:45
  Crista Cowan: We don't know if he had some sickness, if he was just self-medicating, how he was treating himself, but he knew enough what he was doing that when one of the clerks noticed what had happened and followed him out of the pharmacy, he just said, No, I'm fine, I'm fine.
• 16:59
  Crista Cowan: And he went into his office where he had arranged his couch and he laid down.
• 17:03
  Crista Cowan: And by then, some of the employees had gathered, some of his family had gathered.
• 17:08
  Crista Cowan: And uh unfortunately he passed away there on the couch with them trying to pump his stomach and trying to revive him and get him to um to get some help.
• 17:20
  Crista Cowan: Um, so we don't know exactly what happened at the end of his life, but if we look at all of the rest of his life, the civic service that he offered was so great and his contribution to the community was so great.
• 17:32
  Crista Cowan: And then the house ended up being donated to the city, and it is now the historical society.
• 17:39
  Crista Cowan: And I learned all of that, right, as I visited the place.
• 17:45
  Crista Cowan: And so that one of the things I love about family history, of course, you know this, is walking in their footsteps, being in the places that they were.
• 17:53
  Crista Cowan: And now that I had a little bit of his story, I was able to connect a little bit more with that place.
• 17:59
  Crista Cowan: Now, that sweet little gentleman that helped me that day in the historical society gave me some directions to the local cemetery.
• 18:07
  Crista Cowan: He gave me directions to the local library, and I proceeded to just have a wonderful day in Ashland where I got to do some deep dives into some additional records.
• 18:19
  Crista Cowan: And in the process, I uncovered a little bit more about my great-great-grandfather Robert and why he had moved to Ashland.
• 18:28
  Crista Cowan: Turns out, after his service making saddles in the Civil War, he had been appointed, I think it was by Grover Cleveland, to be the postmaster general for that region of Ohio at the time.
• 18:42
  Crista Cowan: And so he moved there to do that.
• 18:45
  Crista Cowan: Uh, and that was kind of his occupation for the last several years of his life.
• 18:52
  Crista Cowan: Now, that's John, that's Robert, and then we're back to Jacob Pitts or Cowan.
• 19:01
  Crista Cowan: So Jacob was an interesting individual because he actually served as a Ohio state um legislator um at the in the House of Representatives.
• 19:15
  Crista Cowan: So he went to the federal government while his brother John was a state legislator.
• 19:20
  Crista Cowan: And that everybody talked about him.
• 19:23
  Crista Cowan: There were biographies about him, there was all sorts of information about him.
• 19:26
  Crista Cowan: Um, and it was really easy to find information about his civil career.
• 19:31
  Crista Cowan: But as I started digging into it, I wanted to know more about his personal life.
• 19:37
  Crista Cowan: And that became a little bit more difficult to find.
• 19:40
  Crista Cowan: And what I understood as I dug into it was that he was a very private man.
• 19:45
  Crista Cowan: So he wanted to serve as a civil servant.
• 19:48
  Crista Cowan: So he ran for office and he served in local offices and then eventually, like I said, made it to the um the House of Representatives and served at the federal level.
• 19:59
  Crista Cowan: But he managed to keep his personal life really personal.
• 20:03
  Crista Cowan: Now that may not sound like a big big deal if you're thinking, oh, in the 1800s, like everything was private, right?
• 20:09
  Crista Cowan: Today, everything's so public.
• 20:11
  Crista Cowan: We have instant, you know, instant information on Facebook and on Instagram and the news and the internet just makes everything so pervasive and public.
• 20:20
  Crista Cowan: And it must be that, you know, before all those things existed, stuff was so private.
• 20:26
  Crista Cowan: But the reality is, if you've ever read an old newspaper, you know things were not that private.
• 20:33
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, when John died, the circumstances surrounding his death were splashed across newspapers all over the state of Ohio and weird, intimate details about conversations and his family.
• 20:48
  Crista Cowan: And so the fact that John's death had been so public and his life had been so public, the fact that his brother Jacob, who had served in a higher position in government than him, had such a private life was a really interesting contrast to me.
• 21:04
  Crista Cowan: And so I went digging into the life of this, you know, state representative from the state of Ohio to see what I could learn about the brother of my great-great-grandfather.
• 21:16
  Crista Cowan: And I was able to uncover some information.
• 21:19
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, most of the information I was able to uncover came from information about his wife and her service in the community.
• 21:31
  Crista Cowan: So not only was Jacob a civil servant, but his wife was the kind of woman who volunteered in civic organizations and civic community uh uh activism.
• 21:45
  Crista Cowan: And because of that, she gained a little bit of notoriety.
• 21:49
  Crista Cowan: And so once I figured out who she was, I was able to learn a lot more about the family.
• 21:55
  Crista Cowan: Unfortunately, they weren't as lucky as.
• 21:59
  Crista Cowan: George and Jane, they had several children and they lost four out of their nine children as died as children.
• 22:11
  Crista Cowan: And the heartache that comes with that, and the I just I can't even imagine.
• 22:17
  Crista Cowan: And some of those children died at less than a year old, but some of them died at seven and eight years old.
• 22:22
  Crista Cowan: And it just breaks my heart when I think about here's this woman serving her community and being active.
• 22:28
  Crista Cowan: Here's this man, you know, trying to serve his community.
• 22:32
  Crista Cowan: And their family is having these struggles all through that period of time.
• 22:37
  Crista Cowan: And just it just really makes me sad.
• 22:40
  Crista Cowan: I dug into some additional family files and actually was able to uncover information, though, about their children who survived to adulthood and the stories that they shared and the pictures that they had.
• 22:53
  Crista Cowan: Just such a treasure to be able to have those.
• 22:57
  Crista Cowan: Well, those are three of the 13 children of George and Jane, John, Jacob, and Robert.
• 23:03
  Crista Cowan: And again, still didn't know where Jacob Pitzer Cowan came from or Robert Watson Cowan until one day I was going through my family tree and I realized that I hadn't fully um transcribed all of the census records for George and Jane.
• 23:20
  Crista Cowan: I had just kind of attached them or linked them in my tree.
• 23:23
  Crista Cowan: And so I decided to go back and transcribe those census records.
• 23:26
  Crista Cowan: And as I was digging through them, one of the census records that I came across was the 1830 census.
• 23:34
  Crista Cowan: They were um living just outside of Steubenville, Ohio at the time.
• 23:39
  Crista Cowan: And of course, the 1830 census, if you remember, it only lists the head of household.
• 23:45
  Crista Cowan: And then it has tick marks across the page for the uh individuals in the household based on age and gender.
• 23:53
  Crista Cowan: And so we've got George Cowan, and there's two males in the household under the age of five, and three males in the household between five and 10, and a male between 10 and 15, and then of course George is 40 to 50 years old, and there's an under five-year-old female, and a 10 to 15-year-old female, and then Jane is over 40 years old, and all family members are accounted for.
• 24:16
  Crista Cowan: And I could have stopped there.
• 24:18
  Crista Cowan: But one of the things that I have learned in family history is that the stories are sometimes told in the records around the person.
• 24:26
  Crista Cowan: And so I thought, I wonder if anybody else is living around them.
• 24:31
  Crista Cowan: Is George's family?
• 24:33
  Crista Cowan: I'm still looking for his parents.
• 24:35
  Crista Cowan: I've managed to identify a brother or two because of DNA.
• 24:39
  Crista Cowan: Jane's family, I've got a document that lists all of her siblings.
• 24:44
  Crista Cowan: So I know who I'm looking for.
• 24:45
  Crista Cowan: And so I'm looking up and down the page of these heads of household with the tick marks, and I go forward a page and I go backward a page.
• 24:53
  Crista Cowan: And what I discover is that enumerated directly above George and his family is a man named Robert Watson.
• 25:03
  Crista Cowan: And here is Robert Watson in 1830, living next door to George and Jane.
• 25:14
  Crista Cowan: And three years later, my great-great-grandfather is born, and he is named Robert Watson.
• 25:21
  Crista Cowan: Cowan.
• 25:21
  Crista Cowan: And as I'm going through the census, I keep looking at a few pages before and a few pages after, and two pages later, there on the page in the same community is a man named Jacob Pitzer.
• 25:37
  Crista Cowan: And Jacob Pitzer, Cowan, had been, I presume, named after him.
• 25:44
  Crista Cowan: As I dug into the lives of these two men, what I uncovered was that Jacob Pitzer was the town doctor at the time.
• 25:52
  Crista Cowan: And so I suspect he may have been involved in the delivery of those children.
• 25:56
  Crista Cowan: And I wonder how much involvement he had in their lives later that might have convinced John to become a doctor.
• 26:04
  Crista Cowan: I still haven't figured out exactly who Robert Watson is or what his significance was to the family.
• 26:13
  Crista Cowan: But that's one of the things I love about family history, and one of the things that I love about family stories is that there's always something new to uncover.
• 26:23
  Crista Cowan: Now, the second trip I made to Ashland, Ohio, I had been in Cincinnati for the Jewish Genealogy Conference.
• 26:31
  Crista Cowan: Ah, it was in like 2017 or 2018.
• 26:34
  Crista Cowan: And so it had been almost, well, over 20 years since I had been to Ashland.
• 26:40
  Crista Cowan: And if you look at the state of Ohio, Toledo side, on the north, and Cincinnati is over on the northeast side.
• 26:50
  Crista Cowan: And if you just kind of draw a triangle a hundred miles down toward the center of the state, that's where Ashland is.
• 26:58
  Crista Cowan: So it was a little over a hundred miles from Toledo to drive to Ashland.
• 27:02
  Crista Cowan: It was a little over a hundred miles from Cincinnati to drive to Ashland.
• 27:07
  Crista Cowan: And so I decided once again to make the drive.
• 27:11
  Crista Cowan: And I went to the house of John Cowan, that is still the County Historical Society.
• 27:17
  Crista Cowan: And the sweet man that had helped me 20 years earlier was not there.
• 27:20
  Crista Cowan: But there was a woman who was kind enough to show me around and show me some of the recent acquisitions of local historical ephemera.
• 27:28
  Crista Cowan: And when I told her what my last name was, she instantly asked, Oh, are you related to John Cowan?
• 27:34
  Crista Cowan: And this time I was able to say, Yes, I am, and I know exactly who he is.
• 27:39
  Crista Cowan: And would you like me to tell you some things about his family?
• 27:42
  Crista Cowan: And I was able then to share some things with her that she didn't know about his 12 brothers and sisters, and the one that was the saddle maker during the Civil War in Steubenville, Ohio, and the one who was the US representative, and the other brothers who slowly made their way across Ohio, some of them eventually ending up out in Iowa, a couple of them ending up in Canada as land opened up there.
• 28:14
  Crista Cowan: And now here we are, several generations later, and the descendants of George Cowan and Jane Kahn from those 13 children who magically lived to adulthood have managed to spread their way not just deep into the state of Ohio, but all the way across the country.
• 28:34
  Crista Cowan: And descendants of George and Jane can now be found in 47 of the 50 states and seven countries around the world.
• 28:44
  Crista Cowan: I think that's pretty remarkable from a weaver in his late 20s who made his way from county-down Ireland into Connecticut and eventually settled in Ohio and raised a family in a new country that was still trying to find its footing, that fell into civil war and that eventually led to a posterity that valued civil service and contributing to their communities in really meaningful ways.
• 29:16
  Crista Cowan: And Ohio was the foundational soil in which that family grew.