My teen-aged great-grandmother, Winnie Cunningham, walked from Kansas to northeastern Illinois next to her family’s covered wagon. Her parents pursued a religious utopia. Her future husband, Luther Loy, had parents after the same dream; the Loys likely took a train from Kansas. The theocracy they were drawn to did not last. It took less time for most in the family to turn away from it.
The story of that girl walking next to a covered wagon captured this girl’s attention. Winnie was the oldest woman that I had seen. She died just shy of her 100th birthday. Thinking of her as a girl sturdy enough to walk across the country tested my imagination. Learning more about where Winnie and Luther came from peaked my interest in Kansas genealogy.
Over a century after Winnie’s longest walk, my Historic Kansas Case Law page is live. Like the other states in my virtual law library, personal research interest prompted me to create the Historic Kansas Statutes page in 2019.
Case law is law made in appeals courts. Perhaps your ancestor made their way into the Kansas case law volumes. The beauty of digitization is that available books are easily searched. Kansas had its own case digest, and is included in the Pacific Digest, if you can get your hands on either. Not many digitized Kansas case digests were found.
Head out to the virtual law library’s Historic Kansas Case Law page, where I hope that you find good stuff, minus a long walk to the library.
