Plat books are such a fascinating resource, especially when they can be aligned to a census taken around the same time. The FAN club (friends, family, associates, neighbors) principle is the simple idea of looking at the people around the research subject to glean more insights about their life.

In the case of Peter King, I have a hypothesis about the specific location of his residence in 1870 using a plat book and a census record.

Peter lived in Pleasant Hill, in Sullivan County, Missouri, with Amanda and Melissa  and was born in Canada East, today’s Québec.

Fortunately, the Edwards Brothers of Missouri published a plat book in 1877 so there is only a seven year gap between the two records. A lot can happen in a seven year span, but it’s much better than decades apart. My thought process is that property didn’t change ownership frequently at this time and tended to stay in the family. So I’m fairly confident that the residents didn’t change dramatically between 1870 to 1877.

It took a while to locate Pleasant Valley. It does not exist today, and I wasn’t able to find it in a gazetteer. Since Milan is listed as the post office, I started there because it’s the county seat and well-established today. I didn’t recognize any of the land owner names on the Milan map as neighbors of Peter. It’s quite tedious to look at every detail on the map without knowing which direction to go!

So I found another clue in a Sullivan County history book. It indicated that the nativity of settlers in the mid-1800s along Main Locust Creek were Canadians. Jackpot! I traced Main Locust Creek south of Milan and began recognizing the names of Peter’s neighbors.

Here is the full plat map of that area:

Source: “An illustrated historical atlas of Sullivan County, Missouri, 1877,” Plat Maps of Missouri, 61N 20W, image 27, The State Historical Society of Missouri (http://www.digital.shsmo.org : accessed 13 June 2022); Edwards Brothers of Missouri, 1877, Philadelphia, PA.

From there, I zoomed into the area and attempted to plot the enumerator’s path through the neighborhood to understand the order in which each family who owned land was recorded on the sheet. I hand wrote and boxed the dwelling numbers of Peter’s neighbors.

The exciting breakthrough came when I found the property of E. Hollon in sections 11 and 14 above. I believe this land owner is Ephriam Hollon, Amanda’s father. Ephriam’s real estate value is $3,000 so the census record corroborates the plat map evidence. The Hollon family was enumerated just a few dwellings away from Peter and Amanda - 83 and 89, respectively.

Source: “1870 U.S. Federal Census,” Missouri > Sullivan > Pleasant Hill, image 12, household of Ephriam Hollon, database with images, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 2 June 2022); National Archives and Records Administration microfilm publication M593, page 267B, dwelling 83, Washington, D.C.

Here’s where the hypothesis is formed. Ephraim had two plots of land diagonally situated. I think there’s a strong likelihood that Peter and Amanda lived near Ephraim’s smaller piece of land, marked as dwelling 89:

This is not definitive proof of Peter and Amanda’s residence in 1870, and it’s not really possible to pinpoint the exact route of the enumerator. However there’s a lot of evidence that supports they did live very close to this location. Seeing the area of an ancestor’s residence makes them feel closer and more real. To know they walked these roads and knew these people adds a new dimension to their life.