Hi Everyone, I want to thank all of you who wrote to me with suggestions about how to spend my time when visiting Pike County. I think that I was very efficient during my brief time there - mostly because of your excellent suggestions. I just got back from my visit to Pike County. I drove up to Grundy, VA last Monday. I was able to do research in Pikeville for three whole days. On Friday, we toured a couple of cemeteries and a local church before heading back home to South Carolina. As you can probably guess, three and half days was just not enough to see and do everything that I wanted to, but it was a great trip. The major places that I visited were the Pike County courthouse and the Special Collections room at Pikeville College library. I was at the Pikeville College library for only one day (definitely not enough time), but I did not even stop for lunch. I wish I had another day just to browse. I spent two days at the court house, but they were not full days. I had lunch one day with a cousin that I had not seen for over twenty years. On another day, I spent the early morning at the Buchanan County courthouse trying to locate a marriage record that should have been in Pike County, but was just not there. There was good and bad news about the visit to Buchanan county. The good news was that I found one of the missing marriages. The bad news was that it was in marriage book #1 which they did not have at the courthouse anymore. I stopped by the Tourism/Visitor Information booth looking for local maps and found a book on Pike County for sale. The title is "Pike County - A Very Different Place" by William David Deskins. It was published in 1994. The book was published in conjunction with the Bicentennial of Kentucky (in 1992). The book begins with a brief overview of the people that may have been in the area 10,000 years ago. It quickly moves into the 1700s and ends with a chapter called - World War II and Beyond. I have not read the entire book yet, but it seems to be an interesting book and contains a section of pictures in the middle. It cost $30.00. One of the more interesting finds from the Special Collection room was a file cabinet of Community Studies. Apparently, students at Pikeville College taking a course called Appalachian Studies are required to do a project/report on an Appalachian community. Most of the reports were brief (only 4-10 pages), but they were on very specific communities in Pike County. Most of the students would pick their home community if they were from the area. These studies usually included oral interviews with an older person in the area (many times it seemed to be an interview with grandparents or some other local older person). I actually found a study that mentioned my GG-grandfather by name. The report usually included the names of the major families in the community. I copied several of the reports that dealt with the area that my mother and her cousins grew up in. They had a wonderful time reading the reports because they typically were about people that they knew "in the old days". The communities that I was looking into were Mouthcard, Feds Creek, and Little Card (which was filed under Card Creek). One of the reasons that I mentioned these community studies was because I always looked at the back page of a report for the bibliography. In two of the reports, I saw a reference to "100 year History of Mouthcard Baptist Church". This was the church that my family attended. This was not a document that seemed to be located in any library - it was distributed to church members at the time, but after talking to the pastor of the church, he has tracked down a copy of the church history and is making me a copy. The courthouse was a wonderful place to visit. I was able to look at original marriage documents for most of the marriages in my main lines. The courthouse also had copies of Pike county census records plus a good collection of surrounding counties' census records. These were very helpful when I found a marriage record that gave me a new family branch to look at. In my library in South Carolina, I only have the microfilm to look at, so it was nice to see indexed books of most of census information. I wish my library had a copy of the books. The courthouse charged $0.25 per page for marriage records, census info and school census records. In the deed and will section however, each page costs several dollars ($5.00 for a two page deed). My family transferred land and recorded a lot of deeds, so I did not get too many of those records. Apologies for the length of this post. I had such a great time on my visit that I wanted to share a little with you. This was definitely not my last trip to Pike County. One additional note - The fall foliage this year is just spectacular. The entire drive from South Carolina to Kentucky was one breathtaking view after another. Happy Hunting Everyone... -- Susan Martucci jkdevl@earthlink.net