eileends wrote: > Greetings, Montgomery County researchers. During a visit home to St. Louis > next week, I plan to spend a day researching a link between my ancestors > (Frederick HORNBURG, husband of Elizabeth KASSEL) and Montgomery County. > One of the connections is that the family lived in Butler Township during > the 1870 federal census. Secondly, although the family moved to St. Louis, > MO, Frederick was buried in Butler, IL in 1887, his daughter Anna HORNBURG > METTY was buried in Hillsboro, IL in 1910, and his wife, Elizabeth KASSEL > HORNBURG was buried in Bethania Cemetery in 1904 (the only cemetery I've > found with this name is in Cook County, IL). I haven't found where in > Butler and Hillsboro the father and daughter are buried. > > I'm seeking your advice on what my plan should be: My visit is simply to > find more connections to Montgomery County and to Illinois in general for > this and another set of ancestors (FOGARTY-FITZGERALD) who may have lived in > Illinois for a time. Should I plan to visit both Montgomery County > libraries as well as the State Archives in Springfield? I understand > Hillsboro has a public library with some genealogical information. Are > there other worthwhile places to visit? Is it fairly easy to negotiate your > way around the State Archives if you haven't been there before? > > Any advice is most appreciated! > > Eileen in SD > > ==== ILMONTGO Mailing List ==== > List problems? First, read the Welcome Message that you received > when you subscribed. Feel free to contact Dianne Curry Morris, > list administrator with questions concerning this list! mail to:[email protected] > > ============================== > Genealogy calendars, guestbooks and more: > Visit RootsWeb's Resource Center at > http://resources.rootsweb.com/ Hello from Chicago---I made a research trip to Montgomery County last spring. First of all, the courthouse at Hillsboro isn't open weekends, as I'm sure you know already. Second, it closes M-F at about 4 PM, so save your evenings for strolling around graveyards and so on. Third, in Hillsboro you have (across the street from each other) the old courthouse and the new courthouse. The new one has wills and estate records: ask at the desk. They will take you to the basement and pull the wills, then you sit at a table right there to work---you can't take them out of the room. So be prepared to take a lot of notes. Ask for every surname you can think of and have them pull all the records at once, while they're at itn. I found some I'd never imagined would exist, and where there was no will, the estate records can still be very revealing (estate inventory, claims against estate, records of sale of stuff, etc.)/ At the old courthouse just ask at the desk and they will show you into a room where you help yourself to records of birth, death, marriage, and land purchase. You work on your own. Standing up---there's noplace to sit down and the tables are of a height that you'd have to stand up anyway. Death certificates didn't start until 1917 but there is an old Death Book (very incomplete) with some records before that. I didn't go to the Hillsboro library but the one in Litchfield has a whole little upstairs genealogy department where I found great riches. If you are staying overnight, forget the Red Rooster Inn, a B & B online. Its location is convenient, right across the street from the courthouse at Hillsboro, but the place is a disaster. The porch furniture is so rusty that you dare not sit on it lest you ruin your clothes. The lobby isn't too bad as the local Good Ole Boys eat breakfast at the hotel, but upstairs is like something from The Addams Family, with long spooky corridors. Our room had filthy dirty carpet and bedspread, stained and mismatched furniture, and piles of dirt in the corners. There was no door on the bathroom, just shutters that didn't meet, and in the middle of the night while we were sleeping, one of the so-called bathroom doors fell down and crashed to the floor, just came right off the hinges. The toilet needed about sixteen flushes in order to flush. The windows were sealed shut. Outside in the hall, the door to the fire escape (second floor) led to a landing hanging loose in space, as the stairs to the ground had fallen off or been removed. As for this being a B & B (as it's advertised) the second B is invalid as we were charged for breakfast. You can get a fairly decent breakfast or lunch at the Red Rooster, and, in any case, there isn't much choice of places to eat. Main Street is full of boarded-up stores, and the Red Rooster is just across from the side doors of the Old Courthouse. There are several chain motels in Litchfield if you have to stay over. The only cemeteries I can tell you about are Clear Springs and Elmwood. The former is impossible to find without close directions from Carol Berry <[email protected]> who maintains this old pioneer graveyard. Elmwood is big and much more modern but the super is seldom in his office---you have to go chase him around the cemetery as he mows grass etc.. He is rather curt so have your list of names at hand if you finally corner him. Springfield: we went only to a library I think is called the Lincoln Library---has a big genealogy department, found a lot of stuff there. Didn't get to the Archives this time. Where to eat: Hillsboro has essentially nothing, not even a supermarket, just one convenience store. We found ourselves going back to Litchfield. Best place we found there was a bakery called Jubelt's which does light meals and has excellent coffee cake and so on. There is also a branch in mid-downtown Springfield. ...so, you want to look in the Death Book and see if you find your folks. If you do, the cemetery will be named. You can also check various cemeteries. By the way, James Starr, the brother of my gg-grandfather, was the surveyor who laid out the town of Butler. At the courthouse I found estate records from that uncle's death at age 31 of diphetheria. His surveying instruments were bought at the auction by his father, obviously to give to his other son, who probably didn't have the money to buy them ($35, a lot in 1863). The surviving son, my gg-grandfather, used them well as he served as Montgomery County Surveyor for 44 years. Good luck in your search. In don't know whether I have helped at all, except to say that I learned so very much from a few days in Montgomery County, and what I got there was information I could never have found anywhere else. Nora Tocus