Carol Cooke Darrow
Your hometown is the place which holds countless happy memories of your childhood. It may be where you grew up or where you visited your grandparents, aunts and uncles. Family history researchers love to explore how their family came to live there, why they chose that place, what their occupations were, and why they continued to live there, sometimes for generations.
My husband’s hometown was Monticello, Iowa, located in eastern Iowa. His ancestors came to Iowa in 1854 from Onondaga County, New York, during the exodus from western New York to the farmlands of Iowa. Most people who moved west were seeking land. Those with money purchased land in prime growing areas. Those with little money invested their sweat equity in homesteads in Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
Sometimes settlers followed the crowds to a popular place. People generally followed climate and growing season maps so that they could grow familiar crops. Sometimes people made the transition from the irregular income from farming to the steady paycheck from the railroads starting in the 1900s or the automobile factories of the 1920s. In Monticello, people worked at the feather factory or the button factory in the 1930s.
In September, 1867, Monticello was incorporated as a city but remained a small town surrounded by farms. Population has ranged from 1,337 in 1870 to a high of 3,836 in 2016. People came to town to go to school, transact business, and attend church. Oakwood Cemetery has more than 4,000 graves in it including several Darrow, Welch, and Aldrich graves. In fact, the whole town history is reflected in that cemetery.
There is no longer a movie theatre or even a McDonalds. If you go home, you may head directly to the farm rather than go to town. But you will be home.
~ Carol Cooke Darrow, CG, teaches free beginning genealogy classes at the downtown Denver Public Library on the second Saturday of every month from 10 – noon.