Searl’s Ridge historian completes book
By Donna Barker
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dbarker@bcrnews.com
PRINCETON — The quest continues to remember and show honor to the Timothy Searl Sr. family of Searl’s Ridge.
Former Arlington resident Dorrie Simon has taken it upon herself to research the history and genealogy of the family of Timothy Searl Sr., her fourth-removed great-grandfather. She has recently compiled that history into a 630-page book, “The Searl Dozen”. The book documents the five sons and seven daughters of Timothy Searl Sr. and Sarah Stiles Searl and their descendants to this present day.
Simon said the book contains photos, obituaries, gravestone photos and family information gathered from hundreds of family members and volunteers. The 16-page introduction tells the history of Searl’s Ridge in Bureau County. Requests for the book must be pre-ordered by Monday through Simon.
Researching and completing the book has been a privilege and labor of love, Simon said.
“I love being thought of as the family storyteller,” Simon said Wednesday. “A genealogist gather names and dates, but family storytellers tell the story of their ancestors, who the people were and what they were like. That’s what I’ve tried to do in this book.”
Simon’s passion for family storytelling actually began with her mother’s side of the family, the McKees, who are buried in the Berean Cemetery near Malden. Simon sorted and organized her mother’s family histories and then turned her attention to her father’s Searl family.
When home to visit family for Thanksgiving in 2002, Simon went to the Searl’s Ridge Cemetery, west of Princeton to visit family graves. But it took some time before she could find the gravestone of her fourth great-grandfather, Timothy Searl Sr., whose headstone was buried in a bed of overgrown lilies next to the headstones of three of his five sons. The stones were badly worn, leaning, broken, almost illegible.
“Someone who has not stood at the grave of a forgotten ancestor and wept will not understand the emotions that filled me,” Simon said. “It’s a deep and overwhelming feeling, one that goes to the very core of who you are and who you came from.”
In 2007, Simon organized a family reunion which also included an extensive clean-up of the Searl family portion of the cemetery, including putting new bases on nearly 30 stones dating from 1836 to 1860s
This fall, on Sept. 19-20, the Searl family will gather for a 175th anniversary of the family’s first arrival to Bureau County. Another workday is planned at the Searl’s Ridge Cemetery, with this year’s work focusing on some of the stones in the back section of the cemetery, the Hosier and Hoskins stones.
The family also plans to do more work at the family gravesites and to erect a new entrance sign at the cemetery, Simon said. The new sign will hopefully reserve the Searl family history for generations to come, she said.
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