My wife and I visited Indiana County for the second time this past week. The first time was last year on a holiday weekend, and we only had time to tromp thru the woods to find where Samuel A. Gibson had lived. This time we were lucky to have two days in Indiana Co. Our stop in Indiana Co. was at the end of 6 day whirl-wind circuit of Pennsylvania. We were first in Reading and Hamburg. My wife has family and history there. Then we spent time in Boothwyn and Wilmington, we have friends and made new friends in that area. On to Indiana Co. . . .I didn’t do my homework though. We drove from Wilmington to Indiana Co., checked into our hotel, and then shot over to the Historical Society. We got to the armory about 3:55, I didn’t know they would close at 4:00. We only planned on doing two things in our visit: to go to the Historical Society to find the locations of a couple of cemeteries, and head to the Court House to find whatever we could there. We drove out of Indiana on 286 and headed to Clymer. At the light there, we turned right and headed up the hill, wound around and got onto Mountain View Rd. We went south on Popson Rd. stopping about half way, on the left is where Samuel A. Gibson lived. Hiram Gibson lived over the hill to the west. Ezekiel Gibson and John Gibson lived to the right, west of Popson Rd. but further south. David Lockard lived over the hill to the east. The McKendricks lived back up on Mountain View Rd. Everything in this area, from Mountain View Rd., south along Popson Rd., east and west, probably to the little bridge, was owned by my Gibson family. How or why did they name the road Popson? We went over to Rich Hill Cemetery, this would be my first visit there. What a small cemetery it is, we almost missed it. Seems like half of the graves there belong to my family and relatives. It’s kept up nice, but I wonder about some vandalism there. There’s some old broken headstones, and the upper part of Hiram Gibson’s stone has been moved two inches. It's not leaning, I couldn’t slide it back. I also noted that you could see exactly where a person was buried. There would be a headstone and then in front of it there would be a depression in the ground. It was quite obvious. It was odd though because there were many depressions in the ground, clearly a place where someone lies, but no headstones. That is a shame, who are all those people? The north “entrance” is OK to enter with a car, but do not use the south one by car. There’s a big rut there and a car will scrape bottom. On Friday morning, we went to the Court House. I was impressed! It was easy to find things, and everyone there was very helpful. We looked up old deeds and title transfers, and made about 25 copies. We looked up some wills and had copies made of them too. We learned that the original wills are kept in the same room, but off to the side. Sometimes there is information in them that wasn’t transcribed and transferred to the large will books. My Hiram Gibson’s original Will had signatures of all of his children, the transcription did not. My Samuel A. Gibson’s Will is missing. The wills are all numbered, and kept in order. We went thru 100 wills checking the numbers, before and after Samuel’s, and his could not be found. I have a transcription of his will, but the original is gone. If you want to look at tax records for Indiana Co., you can go into the basement. There’s a vault that you are allowed to enter and hand search thru the records. There’s tax records on all the townships. The earliest record I could find for Cherryhill Twp., only went back to 1820. If you anything earlier you’ll have to go across the hall into another vault. That’s where they keep the records for Wheatfield Twp., but no one is allowed in there without permission and a police officer. There are currently storing guns in that vault and it is locked to the public. We ended up spending about 5 hours in the Court House. I could have spent another 5 hours, but that’ll be on my next visit. We got up to the Historical Society about 2:30 and we kept ourselves busy there until they closed. There were only a few people there because of the holiday weekend, but I was there on my vacation. In the evening we went to Harmony Cemetery and found many more family members and relatives. We had a good time and look forward to the next time. -Gary T. Gibson ************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour