The Importance of County Histories

Last year I was working on my husband's family line for a class assignment and discovered a county history book that provided valuable information on his family. Not only that, but the individual who had owned the book before donating it to the college library had carefully added pages with old newspaper clippings about the county since the book was published. It was like a time capsule, bringing context to the area my husband’s family had lived in, and the biography of the family provided information about family relationships that had not been known before. So when I started looking at my own family history, I hoped I'd have the same sort of good fortune for the Overmans in Allen County, Kansas.

Cover page for  Allen and Woodson County history.

As it turns out, there is a written history - The History of Allen and Woodson Counties, Kansas. Published in 1901 and 894 pages in length (not counting the index), it contains a detailed biography of my second great grandfather, Peter Jacobson. Peter was the father of Sarah Amelia, who married Charles Foster. Charles and Sarah were the parents of Ida Marinda who married John Carven Overman. John and Ida were the parents of Bobbie Neal, my father. It is a priceless discovery, even if the Overmans didn’t make it into the book. A digital copy of the county history can be viewed and downloaded here. Overmans weren't in the history perhaps because they were relatively new to the County, having been there for only six years when the book was published. However, Fosters are mentioned in the Jacobson biography as well as in other biographies. So was it possible that the Overmans were mentioned in other County Histories?

Cover page for Hamilton County's history.

Prior to moving to Kansas, the Overmans lived in Hamilton County, Indiana. Samuel Cornelius Overman, another second great-grandfather was born in North Carolina in 1805. By the time he was married in 1838, he was living in Hamilton County, Indiana. His son moved from Indiana to Kansas with his family sometime after Samuel Cornelius’s death in 1886. The family lived in Hamilton County for about fifty years and it is likely several Overmans remained after John Milton left. There was a better chance an Overman would be in this county history, depending on whether or not Hamilton County had a published history and when that history was written.

One of the plat maps for the county.

Hamilton County does have a history that was published in 1880. A digital copy can be downloaded here. However, only one Overman is mentioned in the book: Nathan Overman, Samuel Cornelius’s brother who was one of the postmasters for the Westfield post office. Even though none of the Overmans made it into the biography section of the book, there are plat maps which could provide information on the properties owned by the Overmans, as well as illustrations of some of the more prominent farms of the area. Even with no information about the family, the book has value in relating the history of the area they came from and helping us understand the kind of lives they led.