Branching out: the theme for February, 2022

The month of February has a reputation for being in the doldrums of the year, and this February was no exception.  The themes of the four weeks of this challenge were:  Branching Out, Landed, Maps, and Courting.  As it happens, I have done very little work with maps, though they do sometimes reveal interesting details.  In fact, I will tie a couple of these themes together, maybe all of them, in one post . . .

My Prewitt grandparents were both from rural Missouri, a very little town named Elsberry which is about an hour north of St. Louis by modern transportation methods.  Since it is perched on the edge of the Mississippi River, it is highly likely that anyone wanting to go to St. Louis early in the 20th century went by boat.  It is also likely that they would cross the river by boat to get to Calhoun Illinois, where my grandparents were married, since in 2021 you had to drive some distance to get to a bridge and then some more distance to get to Calhoun.  Which brings me to the importance of looking at maps when doing genealogy.  I could not for the longest time figure out why they would have gone to another state to get married (and I still don't have a certain answer) but when I finally took the time to type "Calhoun Illinois" into Google Maps, I discovered it was more like going to the next county than to the next state.

So, I guess my grandparents' courting ended when they landed on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, an almost logical step if you look at a map! 

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