What motivated my fourth great-grandparents John and Margaret (McFarland) Stewart to settle in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania near the end of the Revolutionary War? There may be a very simple explanation: They saw a newspaper ad.
The Freeman’s Journal, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania February 13, 1788, Page 3, Column 3
The Stewarts settled in what was then Wheatfield township, Westmoreland County. Today it is Buffington Township in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. Their land was located at the headwaters of Bracken’s Run, about 4 miles north of Bracken’s Mill. (I give the details of its location in an earlier post.)
The advertisement above appeared in Philadelphia and describes land very near the Stewart homestead in western Pennsylvania. John Stewart acquired his land via a patent from the Commonwealth. It is unclear how this relates to land sold by public auction in Philadelphia.
The lure of large tracts of land in the wilderness was enticing to early settlers. Perhaps it was a similar advertisement that brought my ancestors westward.
Author: Mike
By way of background, I have over forty years experience as a software engineer. I enjoy genealogy as a hobby, which I started in earnest in 1994. I've always liked family history. Now whenever I uncover some fascinating fact about an ancestor, I also take time to read about that era in history. Whether it be the Napoleonic Wars, the Erie Canal, Steamships, the Port of Hamburg, or hurricane tracks, there's always something new to learn.
By 2000 I published my family tree on the Internet. Unfortunately there were no software tools then that did precisely what I wanted. So I created GED-GEN, a Windows program to automatically generate a genealogy website. It converts a GEDCOM data file to a series of web pages in family group sheet format. Since 2002, people from all over the world have used GED-GEN for their websites.
Today I continue to research my family history, with the help of distant cousins. I am also actively creating digital images of my collection of genealogical evidence.
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What motivated my fourth great-grandparents John and Margaret (McFarland) Stewart to settle in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania near the end of the Revolutionary War? There may be a very simple explanation: They saw a newspaper ad.
