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GOOGLEEARTH_IMAGE.JPG Furnace Hill on a Cedar Creek branch. b

C.,

I am simply stunned . It is utterly beautiful ( my eldest daughter was so impressed by the beauty of this area that she still says that she would like to live in Virginia one day) but there is nothing there.

Wait, there is running  water and Furnace Lane and Furnace Run suggest iron or coal, and a quick Google search tells me that there are limestone deposits in the area, very important to a mason.

I never thought that Robert Kerlin was a mason, I rather suspected that he made objects out of iron , was an innkeeper or was on the wrong end of that attempt to raise silkworms in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. But 3 of his 4 sons started out as masons and if one thinks logically, many sons go into their father’s profession ( I am descended from the one son who became a tailor, of all things).

Well, this will keep me busy !

It seems that one has to know far too much, in an attempt to trace ancestors : geology, the roads that led to the West and what states were actually considered a part of Virginia in the 1800′s and who their neighbors were. Proximity really is important.

What do I think happened to Robert Kerlin : I think that he went to Kentucky and died there, leaving a financial mess behind in Ohio. The name of the county has changed so many times, that I cannot  recall what is was then. It is sortof northwest of Louisville. Carroll ? Galliton ?  Very beautiful, hilly country, which one drives through going from Covington to points south.

In the 1790′s, there are Kerlins in that area, and Kerlin is just not that common of a name. And there are Duncans, whom the Kerlin’s knew back in VA. Same ones. The Duncans I am sure of, the Kerlins, I have no idea what the connection is. Maybe none at all.

But three of Robert Kerlin’s sons ended up in Kentucky ( eventually in Louisville, being for the large part masons) and almost all of his grandsons.

Patterns of behavoir, isn’t it ?

Thank you once more !

sue

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