Day 65 - USA Tour - Glendive, MT

Overnight: Glendive, MT
Ancestor Research Day

Before embarking on the genealogy journey today, Dave and I did 4 loads of laundry. Phew! That’s done for another week. You don’t realize how accommodating it is to do laundry in your home. When you have to go to the laundry at the campground, you have to sit and wait. The two times I have gone away and come back later, I had problems. One time, I forgot to put in the money and the other time I had an unbalanced load. So, both of those times, it took twice as long to finish. Now, I'll just have to sit and babysit the machines.

Our first stop this morning was the sheriff’s office in Glendive, the city in which we are camped. This is the city where Dave’s great-grandfather was arrested for horse stealing (he was later acquitted because he was holding the horses or selling the horses to satisfy a debt that he was owed). From Glendive, his great-grandfather was sent back to Missoula to stand trial. Dave was hoping to find some more information other than the newspaper article he currently possesses.

Dave did find the name of the arresting sheriff when we went to the Dawson County Courthouse, also here in Glendive. We also found out that we need to go to Missoula, MT, to find out more information about the arrest as Missoula is the county that issued the warrant for his arrest.

We stopped off at Subway for a quick sandwich before heading north to our next stop, which is Sidney, MT. This is the county seat for Lambert, MT, where his grandparents resided. Dave wanted to find out exactly where their property was located. The county seat of Sidney is about 50 miles from our current location.

There is diverse terrain between Glendive and Sidney. First we cross the beautiful Yellowstone River. It is so huge, and such a surprise to see in this desert area.

Then, we pass wheat fields that are a beautiful shade of yellow. The fun thing to do when we pass them is to look for deer hiding in the fields. They lay down and just poke their heads above the crop top. I have tried to catch a picture of this, but have been unable to do so.



There is also a section that is part of the badlands-type terrain.



Most of the area's terrain, though, is massive wheat farms with oil wells sprinkled in for flavor.

We did run across yet another shape for the haystacks. I call these hay "loaves." They look just like loaves of bread.



At that courthouse we found papers from his great-grandfather and –grandmother’s sides of the family. Dave was also able to get a certified copy of his grandparent’s marriage license.

While in the courthouse at Sidney, we ran into a family that was also doing research. And, surprise, they are distant relatives (cousins of cousins of cousins, so to speak) of Dave’s great-grandmother. That was kind of fun because some of their relatives were also Dave’s.

It’s quite a chore to do this type of research because you have to go through lots of record books to find information. But, it is also addictive. I guess we were going through books and making copies for about 3 hours. We got plat maps of the townships and were able to locate the family's homestead.

We were done about 3:30 PM and headed for "home." For dinner I had cooked corned beef and cabbage with potatoes in the crockpot. It was so nice to have the meal all done when we arrived home.

In the evening, Dave busied himself with trying to put a lot of pieces together from the information he retrieved. He has 25 pages of records, 2 large city maps, and his grandparent’s marriage license to sort through. I, on the other hand, busied myself with the important task of catching up on my reality TV shows.