Writing my paper about Daniel and Sarah Higgins

I originally planned to write my paper about Nellie Bessie Higgins, her husband Edwin Emmanuel Peterson and their nine children.  This is my mother-in-law’s family.   As I started to write, I decided to mention a little bit about Nellie and Ed’s grandparents.  I started with Jackson Higgins as a child making the trek with his family from Ohio to Schuyler County and never went beyond that.  There was so much to record and learn about Brooklyn, Illinois in 1850.  I did not want to skim over this time.  The paper on the Peterson family will have to wait for another time.

This is the story of Daniel and Sarah Higgins, their children and grandchildren.  Daniel was born in Greene, Greene, Pennsylvania to Joseph and Polly (Henderson) Higgins.  It is about a period in time when Illinois was a wild untamed place, a true frontier waiting to be civilized and conquered. The stories of the massive snake dens especially caught my attention.  I can hardly image the courage required to tame this place.  I hungered for more information.  I wanted to understand what experiences the Higgins family had that shaped their lives.

I was delighted to find the story of Daniel, Jackson and Henry published in several books such as the Biographical Review of Cass, Schuyler and Brown Counties, Schuyler County Historical Encyclopedia and  Schuyler County Illinois History Vol I and Vol II.  I discovered a wonderful web site, Illinois Gen Web Project that contains a wealth of information for this project.

Candy Moulton’s The Writer’s Guide to Everyday Life in the Wild West had a great chapter on clothing for the time of my paper.  I found an Archaeological study done on a cabin site of one of Daniel’s neighbors.  This study published an 1872 plot map, which was a jackpot of information for me.  I could actually see where the various farms were and who owned the neighboring land.  This map is on the title page.

Ancestry.com proved to be a valuable resource as well.  Here I was able to locate the Federal Census Records, the non-population agricultural Census Records and one Illinois state Census.  I was disappointed in the non-population agricultural census.  There was so much information available but I could not read the smeared printing to know what the questions were.  I searched the internet and found a pdf file with the blank and very readable Agriculture Census records as well as explanations for some of the fields.  This find allowed me to harvest the fabulous information found in the Agricultural Census Records giving a snap shot look at their farms.

While researching for this paper I discovered the internet site scholar.google.com.  What a great resource for finding journals and papers!  I also learned quite a bit about the turmoil bubbling in Central Illinois due to the Congressional Conscription Act in 1863.  I was unable to find any direct reference to how the Higgins family felt about the Civil War besides the fact that they were democrats.  According to what I learned, the democrats were not in favor of the war, I am assuming this is true of the Higgins boys as well.  It appears none of them ran off to enlist or actually fought into the war.