. Volume 2 Jump to Page Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Go Back to Index TOGA NEWS Issue 10, October, 2002

From the cemetery we began heading south east toward Rockville and Montgomery County, Maryland, where we would be spending the next few days. Thus far, the TOGA-Xpedition was mostly field trips and sight-seeing. From here on out we'd be spending a lot of our time in Libraries and Courthouses. We arrived in Rockville about 7pm and set up our laptops in the motel rooms and began the arduous task of copying all the information we had accumulated in Pennsylvania. We transferred our data from digital cameras onto zip disks, hard drives and CD's. We'd also use the phone lines in the motels to log in and get our email messages during the trip. We had a few problems with the phone lines and with the furniture locations in relationship to the phones, etc. At a couple of the rooms we stayed in we had to rearrange the furniture to accommodate our "data transfer" sessions. As the expedition progressed we began meeting each night to go over our data, share pizza, and decide what we felt we should do the next day.

    Day 4 of the TOGA-Xpedition was by far the most fruitful of all. We started out by visiting The Sween Library, in Rockville, Montgomery County, Maryland. Named after Jane C. Sween who operated the library for many years, The Sween Library contained a veritable wealth of O'Neal records. We were fortunate that on the day we visited, Jane Sween, who is now retired, just happened to be at the library. We were at the doors first thing in the morning, waiting for them to open. When they did, we walked in and announced that we were here to search out information on the Montgomery County O'Neal's. Jane smiled and told us we had come to the right place, offered us a table to sit at and began delivering, books, ledgers, indexes, etc. to our table. These contained, deeds, christenings, birth & death records, marriage records, land plats, bills of sale, etc.
    We dove into the data and before we knew it the day was drawing to a close. We began packing up our gear and we were very excited when we realized we had accumulated $40.oo in copying fees at .25¢ per copy, which amounts to 160 pages of documentation. Bev & I are still working at transcribing all this data into spreadsheets. At last count we have added 367 records to the spreadsheet with many more to go. When completed the spreadsheets will be converted to html documents and posted on the TOGA Website.
    I'd highly recommend any researchers looking for O'Neal information visit the Sween Library. I'm sure we did not capture EVERYTHING they had to offer during our one day visit there. Also, while we were there we were told that teams of local researchers and students continue to go through old records and are transcribing and/or copying them, to make them available to future researchers.