Fair warning, this is the third of four parts of a letter mailed from Leonard, Iowa, in March of 1901. In this section, Daniel Leonard describes what he saw and learned while visiting three of his eight siblings in Delaware, Marion, and Lorain Counties, Ohio.

“…We spent three or four days in Marion and Delaware counties looking for Shropshire sheep but to my disappointment I found none, but I saw one of the finest herds of Red Polls perhaps in Ohio, at least the finest I ever saw. Professor Curtis had passed them on and he knows….”

Early on in my family history research, I had the impression that my great-great-grandfather was either estranged from his birth family or completely cut off from the civilized world. That impression was based on the lack of evidence that they had communicated or visited one another.

Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong, as demonstrated by the following letter mailed from Leonard, Iowa (the post office named in Uncle Dan’s honor) to the editor of the Adams County (Iowa) Free Press…