Documents found on Kansas Trip

On my trip to Jewell County, Kansas I found the time to visit the County Clerks office. Unfortunately, the time I found was not nearly enough to examine all the documents I wanted to, but I did still find some interesting ones I thought I would share today.

My trip to Kansas: Things I did and saw

I am currently on an almost 2 week-long trip to Mcpherson Kansas to see my grandpa Tim Wesselowski and to do some genealogical research. Thus far it has been an extremely successful and eventful trip, one that has provided the answer to a 100-year-old mystery (although that part of the trip warrants its own post). In this post I will simply write about the things I saw, what I did, and the best parts of the trip.

I'll start off by listing off the genealogy related things I did, although I won't go into detail here, the post would be far too long!

1. Scanned in over 500 (as of today) family photos in my grandpa's possession
2. Recorded about 3 hours of an interview (done over several sessions) with my Grandpa Tim about his childhood, his parents, and his grandparents.
3. Visited the Couch Cemetery and the Jewell City Cemetery and took pictures of the graves and visited with deceased relatives.
4. Visited the Court House in Mankato and found a lot of records on the family.

You can look forward to more detailed descriptions of all those things in future posts- this one will be about my sightseeing excursions and miscellaneous activities I partook in.

I'll start with today and go backward:

Today my mom, my grandpa Tim, and I journeyed to the border of Kansas and Nebraska, finding ourselves in the rolling hills and expansive plains that constitute the rural county of Jewell. The trip was specifically planned to coincide with the solar eclipse. We imagined watching the sky turn an inky black, the moon blotting out the sun so, for a fleeting couple of minutes, a million stars could paint the sky deep hues of blue and purple.

Unfortunately, that did not happen. We went up to Couch Cemetery to watch and the sky got slightly dim at best. The clouds that decided to roll in about 3 minutes before 1:01 (the time the eclipse was supposed to peak) also did a pretty great job of making it impossible to see anything interesting. It was still pretty darn cool though and the dim lighting made for perfect picture taking weather. Here are some snapshots from the evening.

Couch Cemetery Mid Eclipse

Me, looking through my phone at the sun (All the stores were out of eclipse glasses)