From an installment of “Genealogy Notebook” in the Spring 2005 issue of Pennsylvania Heritage magazine, reprinted with permission given by Michael J. O’Malley III, editor.
Beginner family historians are counseled that going beyond their own direct line to find information about siblings of their ancestors — called “whole-family genealogy” — can help avoid and reduce errors, as well as add a rich dimension to their pedigree quests. More and more genealogists are ratcheting up the “whole-family genealogy” concept a few more notches by engaging in “community studies” that research all the families of a specific area in a fixed time period.
One such study in progress is the Sinking Valley Family Tree Project spearheaded by Aileen Fulcomer and Karen Morrow. Sinking Valley, in Tyrone Township in northern Blair County, is triangular — bordered on two sides by mountains and on the third by the Little Juniata River.
Penn’s Manor
The descendants of William Penn surveyed the Sinking Valley as a proprietary manor in 1762. (The term manor was applied to the most valuable of the Penn family’s tracts of land.) Penn’s heirs eventually divided and sold the land between 1787 and 1813 to nearly four dozen purchasers. Fulcomer and Morrow’s purpose for their Sinking Valley project is to collect, preserve, and distribute the family histories of both the original and subsequent early landowners. In addition to the genealogical aspect, an effort has been made to link the families to the location of their former properties and residences.
Morrow believes early dwelling building in the Valley went through three stages. The very first pioneers used logs, but within a generation, the more prosperous farmers erected more substantial stone houses, of which only three, dated between 1801 and 1805, exist. By the 1830s, Georgian-style brick homes were in vogue, according to Morrow.
Geography and Settlers
Karen Morrow says Sinking Valley’s name, and the early occasional use of “Sinking Spring Valley,” is derived from the presence of half a dozen sinkholes, numerous abundant springs, Tytoona Cave, a natural limestone arch named Arch Spring, and several streams that run along the surface then disappear. It originally was believed that there was a large quantity of lead in Sinking Valley, and in 1778, Fort Roberdeau — known as the “Lead Mine Fort” — was erected to protect settlers from the Indians and as a lead mining operation to provide bullets for the militia. A re-creation of Fort Roberdeau was erected on the original site in 1976 as a Bicentennial project.
The early settlers came from three different ethnic and religious groups. Families with surnames of Crawford, Murray, Stewart, Dysart, Moore, and Wilson were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. Settlers with surnames of Fleck and Cressman were German Lutherans, who formally organized a congregation in 1804. The McClain and the McMullen families were Roman Catholic. Originally, Tyrone Township was part of Huntingdon County when it was created in 1787, and extended into what are now six different townships in Blair and Huntingdon Counties. When Blair County was established in 1846, the township was confined to Sinking Valley proper.
The Project Leaders
Fulcomer’s and Morrow’s families both claim longtime ties to the Valley. Morrow’s husband, John, is descended from original settlers named Murray (later changed to Morrow), Moore, Crawford, and Stewart, while Fulcomer is a descendant of original settlers with surnames of Crawford and Dysart. Morrow, the project’s lead researcher, possesses knowledge of architecture; her husband is a valuable resource because he has lived in Sinking Valley his entire life. Fulcomer is an expert at collecting, preserving, and distributing information gathered from various individuals who have shared family trees, pictures, scrapbooks, ephemera, and documents.
Among the materials Morrow and Fulcomer have produced is a booklet that has as its centerpiece a photograph taken at the first Morrow family reunion in 1922 of 103 attendees. The booklet identifies seventy-nine of these individuals as descendants of six of the original settlers; others were subsequent landowners who married into these original families — Tussey, McCormick, Dickson, Wallace, and Burket. An ongoing project profiles pioneer settler James Crawford and his descendants. A Crawford-owned house has been in the family for six generations.
Because Sinking Valley was such a “finite area,” sons who did not stand to inherit land often went off to find jobs outside the Valley, primarily with the railroad in Tyrone and Altoona. Several group outmigrations have been documented, particularly to Smicksburg, Indiana County and to two sites in the Midwest: Dixon, Illinois and Aberdeen, South Dakota.
As an example of the synergy that a “community study” creates, Morrow said that both people and materials are involved. “Three individuals helped me identify the 103 people in the Morrow reunion picture. Each knew a piece the others did not, and in the end all but one child is identified. Property descriptions contained in deeds are an example of material sources. The boundaries often are given as the neighbor’s property line so we know who the neighbors were on all sides. This, in turn, helps us trace the ownership of adjoining property.”
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