I also plan on posting research methods that have worked well for me, so maybe someone out there will find either that or the data useful.  You can check it out here.

I will, however, keep updating this site with new genealogy pages I do and genealogical trips I go on.

What’s so tricky about these two is that there are so many variations on the spellings of their last names.  Elizabeth’s has been spelled Bry, Brey, Bray, and even Brier and Jacob’s has been spelled Beal, Beals, Beels, and Biehl.

So far I have her page up on my Beals/Hall genealogy wiki and have posted the info that I already had, now I’m going to see if I can find more… to start with, I’m doing a small page on Elizabeth’s birthplace (and the home of many of my ancestors),  Lehigh County, PA to get a better picture of the history and land and to serve as a placeholder for my favorite Lehigh links to refer to later.

James Francis Beals

I’m still working mainly on my dad’s side of the family and have spent the past couple of days putting James Francis Beals‘s page together and it would truly be ‘but a mere shadow of its former self’ (a phrase my dad used to use often) if it weren’t for the vast amount of information on James F. Beals that Mouser Ancestry has gathered and allowed me to use in my tree.

So while my husband’s ancestors were medicine men and Cherokee outlaws, mine were vanilla German farmers in Pennsylvania - well, vanilla as far as I know, there still could be stories out there to uncover and mysteries to reveal.

Cherokee Heritage Center

Ned Christie - my husband's direct ancestor!

This weekend my husband, daughter, and I went to Tahlequah to do some research on my husband’s Cherokee side of the family at the Cherokee Heritage Center and Tsa La Gi village.  It was a splendid trip all around!  ‘Twas a beautiful Spring day, and all of Tahlequah was in bloom.  If you’ve never been there, it’s one of the most beautiful, magical places in the world with so much intrigue.  It triples as a college town, a Native American cultural area, as well as an Okie small town so it has all of these worlds colliding, but what’s really special about it is that it’s nestled in the heart of a hilly forest, not to mention it’s also the most relaxed place.

Not only was it a lovely road trip, but I got a wealth of information!  No really, a treasure trove of information!  We went Saturday morning and they had a genealogy helper there, the nicest guy, who was able to pull up my husband’s family history seven generations back.  It had their Native American names and even stories about many of them.  I found out that Ned Christie (the only man the the U.S. military ever went after with a cannon!) is in my husband’s direct line and that some of his other direct ancestors died on the Trail of Tears, where many Native Americans were forced to move out of their lands and into Oklahoma and many died along the way. 

We went from the museum which displayed both the artwork and pride of the Cherokees along with the sad history, to a tour of the ancient Tsa La Gi village.   So it was a nice family trip as well as being a productive research trip; we all enjoyed visiting the museum and taking a tour of the village. 

My husband’s relatives had remembered little about their family history so I was afraid that his side would remain very much a mystery, but now a whole new world of information has opened up – enough to keep me very busy for a long time on my genealogy wiki.  And what a rich, colorful history his family has!  Along with Cherokee outlaw Ned Christie and Trail of Tears survivors, there was a medicine man and a murderer in the family.

Here are some photos from our family/genealogical trip to Tahlequah:

Cherokee National Museum and Genealogical Research Center

Trail of Tears Plaque

Trail of Tears Plaque

Tsa La Gi Village

Tsa La Gi - an ancient Cherokee village

Cherokee dolls and pottery at a typical Cherokee home

Our guide showed us how the young Cherokee boys would hunt with blowguns

The Cherokees made bows and arrows like this one and chipped stones to craft arrowheads

Flint stones for weapons

The interior of a typical tribal meeting house where community decisions were made. It was a warm day but inside it was as cool as can be - the Cherokees had a ventilation system where hot air escaped from the top of the building and cool air came in through the bottom.

We learned a lot about our family, enjoyed the perfecto weather, and finished off our day with a late lunch of burgers at a local favorite restaurant in Tahlequah – Del Rancho.

I’m steadily working down my direct line first, and have got the pages for my parents, Larry and Carol Beals, updated as well as the page for Larry’s dad James Loy Beals.

Now that both of my parents have passed away, I’ve been spending a lot of time at their house going through pictures and newspaper clippings so that I can salvage and preserve as much as possible before the upcoming estate sale, and I hope to scan all or most of it eventually for the site.

I’m also still using Ancestry.com for research because they provide a wealth of information as far as census records, Social Security Death indexes, military records, etc. go.