I was reading in my ancestry magazine and found a link to a site with genealogy resources on it. From there I found this photo site. It mentioned that is was originally started for old photos in the Western Pennsylvania area, which is where my mother’s family came from. I thought I would give it a try.
They have a surname search which I find a lot more helpful than the guessing game you play with searches and surnames. It didn’t take long and I found a first cousin five times removed. Her name is Margaret Kilgore, they called her Peggy, she was married to John Gilmore. Her grandfather was my fifth great grandfather.
In the area in western Pennsylvania that she lived in, families would lease out their land for oil prospectors to drill on. The hills were stripped of trees and fields were loaded with tall wooden drilling rigs. There is a picture of Ellen Gilmore, daughter of Peggy and John Gilmore, and her husband Newton Mortland, sitting in front of one of these rigs on their property.