The O'Neal Genealogy
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TOGA NEWS
Volume IV,
Issue 02, February, 2004

New Content and Direction for the O'Neal Website Coming Soon

    Recently I was contacted by Jill O'Neall Ching. For those of you who haven't met Jill yet, she is the webmaster and founder of the O'Neall One Name Study Site. Jill will be retiring soon and asked if I would be interested in taking over her O'Neall site.  Since our sites are quite similar in design and content we have decided to add Jill's content and ours together to make one huge O'Neall/O'Neal megasite. We are currently working on merging the sites and will let everyone know when the new site comes online.
    Since Jill's site is huge, equivilent is size, breadth and content to our site, and was also put together over many years, with lots of tender loving care, the process of migrating everything over and maintaining it's integrity is a huge job, and one we have chosen to do slowly and accurately. It will take some fair amount of time. I'm hoping to be able to go online within the next month or two.
    A goodly portion of Jill's site deals with the history of Hugh O'Neall, a contemporary of our John Owneill/O'Neale. We've often wondered if Hugh was related to John but have never found any links. Who knows, perhaps someday we will.........

Job O'Neal and Family

    Last month we looked at Peter O'Neal. This month I'd like to share some new information we've recently found for Job O'Neal, Peter's grandson. Job's descendants have been hard to trace because Job moved to Kansas and his sons moved on from there to parts unknown. Thanks to the research of Dalene Day Doman, Michael S. Caldwell, Ken O'Neal and Bev Crowe we have finally been able to find  some new information on Job's descendants.
    The story of Job O'Neal is a fascinating one, to say the least. What compells a man with a wife and several small children to pack all his worldly possessions into the back of a wagon and leave his whole world behind for parts unknown.  We know that Job participated in the Civil War as a Union Soldier. Was he trying to excape bad memories, or was the move to Kansas simply a result of the offer of cheap, propsperous land? We'll probably never know Job's reasons for leaving the comforts of home, but leave he did. He and his young bride and children arrived in central Kansas about 1870 and settled in. Job worked odd jobs and was listed in the census as a laboror. Later he became a shoemaker in Ottawa, Franklin County, Kansas.  He obviously was a good business man. Census indicates he owned his home, so he must have made a good living.  
    Job must have passed the wanderlust on to his children. His eldest son John, left Kansas to settle in Spokane, Washington, where he raised his own family. Another son, William left Kansas for Portland, Oregon. He died at the youthful age of 27 years. He was working in a boatyard and fell from  atop a mast on a ship. The fall crushed his backbone and he died as a result of the fall some weeks afterward.  A copy of his death record from the Oregon State Archives can be found on page 2 of this issue of the newsletter.