Spring cleaning hadn't been foremost on my mind the other day, when my niece asked for a copy of a family document. She is working on an application to become part of The Mayflower Society, and her recent request pushed me to dig out some old files I hadn't worked on for years.
Well, maybe make that decades.
The search led me to some boxed up files which I had removed, years ago, from a file cabinet to make room for more recent records.
To my surprise, what should be the first thing my hand pulled out of that dusty box—hint: it wasn't what I was looking for—but a folder labeled "Rinehart" and some correspondence regarding Greene County, Pennsylvania.
Call that serendipity.
In addition to a photocopied series of biographical entries from the History of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Ohio including Jesse Rinehart's entry in that 1883 book—now easily accessible thanks to Internet Archive—was a photocopied report faxed to me in 1999. I received that report from a fellow Rinehart researcher whom I had met online during those earlier days of genealogy forums and resources such as RootsWeb. He had wanted to share something written by a man named Bruce Anderson, who back in 1981 had compiled a report called "The Rineharts of Perry County, Ohio."
Yes, precisely the family I'm still puzzling over.
What was interesting about the eleven pages of that report was the reference to specific case numbers from the Perry County court system. Of course, now we have almost instant access to some of those same court records, thanks to FamilySearch.org, and specifically owing to the FamilySearch Labs' Full Text Search option. But seeing those other references tells me that there are more court records than the series I had located. There is more to search to fully grasp the entirety of that generation's history in Perry County.
The file I found in that dusty box also included a series of emails which I had exchanged with another Perry County researcher, concerning what we each had found on the Rinehart line which our families share in common. I have yet to complete that stack of reading, but I'm going through that file with a pen and some sticky notes, to mark specific details I need to confirm through documentation—now that it is so much easier to find those records online.
Some family stories we chase for a short while and catch up with the elusive answer in one quick sprint through local records. Others have us wandering in circles for decades. This Rinehart line has been one of the latter. In retrospect, I can see where some conjectures from previous decades can now be proven incorrect—but I also see some hints which, though missed in previous research rounds, may now lead to clearer answers. I'm looking forward to following those trails with fresh eyes, this time around.