From cold cases and forgotten burial grounds to archival surprises, this is the journal of my ongoing work. Start with the featured story, explore the latest dispatches, or search the archive.
Follow the latest evidence from cemeteries, archives, and historic records.
For 60 years, Clinton County’s volunteer Board of Visitors filed annual reports on the infirmary — and never once named the ground where it buried its poorest dead. The director who ended those burials was a genealogist who could not abide a name left unrecorded.
New DNA work on Thomas Jefferson’s hair adds weight to a 200-year-old paternity question. The same kind of evidence helped me find an ancestor’s missing father and relatives the records had scattered. DNA suggests; records confirm.
A Clinton County judge accepted an expert’s opinion that two city emergency clauses were likely drafted with AI. What he wrote next is worth reading closely. The tool is not the question. The checking is.
In July 1874, Ohio’s leading fruit men toured the Clinton County Infirmary farm and found scarcely a defective apple — and none of the published accounts mention what lay near the trees. The designer of Sugar Grove Cemetery supplied the orchard that grew beside the county’s lost graves.
A stone house stands in the woods near Todd’s Fork in Clinton County, Ohio. An 1834 tax entry seemed to date it. The entry is right, but it was written about a different farm.
The date stone on Carthagenia Baptist Church at the Gist Settlement gives two years: built 1897, rebuilt 1958. Newspapers of the 1940s and ’50s gave the congregation an older start, and they don’t agree with each other.
Lorenzo “Cap” Williams spent more than 64 years inside the Clinton County Infirmary — and died seven months after a journalist named the men and women living in a building the state said should not stand. Three names, two buildings, and the ground that was lost across Lytle Creek.
For 60 years, Clinton County’s volunteer Board of Visitors filed annual reports on the infirmary — and never once named the ground where it buried its poorest dead. The director who ended those burials was a genealogist who could not abide a name left unrecorded.