Historical dinner

The Jasper County Historical Society had its annual dinner on Tuesday night with a very good attendance. The dinner was a carry-in dinner, and there were many interesting and delicious things from which to choose. (I forgot to take a picture of the dessert table--it had lots of chocolate items.) My table companions talked about many things, including a lot of local genealogy.

Genealogy was also at the heart of the presentation after the dinner. The topic was Simon Kenton, a renowned frontiersman who was born in Virginia and migrated to Pennsylvania and then to Kentucky as a young man. In Kentucky he was a friend of Daniel Boone and other notable frontiersmen, and he actually had more wilderness and other adventures than Daniel Boone. He ended up in Ohio, where he died in 1836. He never set foot in Jasper County. So why the interest in him? After he died, his widow and her children, as well as a couple of his children from his first marriage, moved to our area, and many people in Jasper and adjoining counties are descend from them. But they were not as interesting as their father.