It would help if you put in the date of your family's involvement in coal mining. I was raised in Clearfield County in the west central part, Penn, Pike, and Bloom Twps are the ones I know best. In the early 1900s there was a lot of deep mines, especially in the south and eastern sections of the county. A lot like the West Virginia mines, the company owned the town, the houses and the stores. There was not a lot of safety. Blasting accidents were common. As I child, our next door neighbor was a widow, her husband being killed in a mining accident. A cousin of my father was blinded in a mining accident. In elementary school in the 1950s we were taught not to swim in strip mine ponds, not to touch blasting caps and not to wander into old mine shafts which had not been sealed. Once or twice a year a child or two in the county would die in one of these accidents. In the 1950s on strip mining came in as a major industry. In general this was safer for the men, but tore up the land pretty much. It was not uncommon for land to be deep mined, later stripped for good coal, later for lessor coal and finally for clay for one of the many brick yards in the county. There were also large stone quarries in the Curwensville and Anderson Creek Hill areas active over time in the 1800s and early 1900s. A lot of Italians were brought in to work in these. Recently a company has started stone quarring again in the area of Bloom's Quarry on Anderson Creek Hill. There is still strip mining along I-80 in Clearfield County and in scattered sites around the county. The recent book by Hughes on Clearfiled County in the 1900s has a lot of names and places listed for mining. ************************************** Get a sneak peak of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour