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.
Albert and Mary Pohl, about 1909
Who would have thought the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) could answer questions about family history? I used NOAA to help solve a mystery about the immigration of my great-grandparents, Albert G. and Maria “Mary” (Pittner) Pohl.