Book and Movie Club: Ohio Books

 Here’s today’s book suggestion: 

I would like to recommend several books for family history seekers.  Some of these may be out-of-print but you should be able to find them at your library, or order them from Alibris.com.  The Bounty Lands by William Donohue Ellis not only informs us on how the bounty land system worked after the Revolutionary War, but the process of Ohio becoming a territory and later a state.  To see how our American form of government worked on a smaller scale is quite an education.

The next recommendation is the series by Conrad Richter-The Trees, The Fields, and The Town.  This series is also about early Ohio.  It is told from the viewpoint of a teenage girl as she and her family settles in early Ohio after walking from Pennsylvania. After her mother dies, her father abandons the family and the girl takes on the protective roll.  We see her grow from a young girl to a young wife and mother, and finally as a grandmother who was very much part of the community that grows around the land her father claimed.  This was made into a television mini-series starring Elizabeth Montgomery.  It was called The Awakening Land.

After reading any of these books, one can understand why records weren’t always created as they had been in the colonies.

Beth Hanson
Williamsburg, VA

If you have a good book or movie that you’d like to suggest, please send it to [email protected]  Thanks to Beth for her recommendations!

 

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