Migration routes New England to NE Ohio

Late last year there were several interesting posts at H-Connecticut on overland migration routes through New York state and Pennsylvania to the Western Reserve of Ohio some 200 years ago. Here's a taste, from the post by Alden O'Brien of the DAR Museum:

There were two main routes to Ohio: thru NY State on a variety of new
turnpikes, and thru Pennsylvania on the "Forbes Road". Roots and Routes
lists some published diaries c 1810 detailing travel on the Forbes road.
I hadn't encountered Roots and Routes before. They say they're
"about family history, heritage travel and more.Our idea is to
use the cultural connections, great migrations, settlements and
symbolic landscapes of North America to inform these popular
avocations and make them more meaningful."

Microhistory and genealogy meet on US 20

How, exactly, did people get from Connecticut to Ohio's Western Reserve in 1817? Over at H-Net, Alden O'Brien of the DAR Museum posted on some of his research, conducted "poring over historical maps on one side of my computer screen with Google maps on the other," as well as some other interesting sources. Part of the route is close to present-day US 20, but that's a gross oversimplification.

This post was on H-Connecticut, "a communications center and discussion forum for Connecticut’s history and heritage communities" sponsored by the Office of the State Historian. This is just one of roughly 150 different history discussion networks (email lists) on the overall site, hosted at Michigan State University. There are lists for Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, as well as the Holy Roman Empire and the culture of industrialization in the South. Check 'em out.

Where some of your midwesterners went

Delia Cothrun Bourne, writing in "Genealogy Gems" #56 (31 October 2008) from Indiana's Allen County Public Library, points us to an eight-volume resource I had never heard of: News of the Plains and Rockies, 1803-1865: Original Narratives of Overland Travel and Adventure Selected from the Wagner-Camp and Becker Bibliography of Western Americana, compiled and annotated by David A. White (978 N474), with 168 original narratives and historians' commentary, arranged topically, with topics including "early explorers, fur hunters, Santa Fe adventurers, settlers, missionaries, Mormons, Indian agents and captives, warriors,
scientists, artists, gold seekers, railroad forerunners, and mailmen."

This isn't in most libraries, according to Worldcat (if you're closer to Chicago, check it out; it is in the Newberry). Ideally these volumes would be useful for general background, or for filling in your research target's likely experiences in the absence of his or her own first-person story. (That's why it's going on my list for my next visit.) But if you're in search of a particular name or names, it is on Google Book Search, in snippet view only.

And apparently it's not the last word. Allen County also has Plains & Rockies, 1800-1865 : one hundred twenty proposed additions to the Wagner-Camp and Becker bibliography of travel and adventure in the American West : with 33 selected reprints. Hi ho, researchers away!