About Blog and Blogger

Sarah Eva Howe in 1897, age 13 or 14

In 1896, 13-year-old Sarah Eva Howe of Carrollton, Kentucky, wrote an essay about the future. She wondered in writing: What would life be like in 1912 for her cousins, her friends, herself?

In her essay,  Sarah is a successful artist, seated in her studio in Paris. She sees outside her window “two little individual flying-machines of the common kind, as used by newsboys and letter-carriers.” One machine drops two letters in her mailbox; the other delivers a newspaper from her home town.

Yes, in 1896, Sarah Eva Howe predicted drones! Throughout her life, Sarah imagined fanciful things and told captivating stories. She was a dreamer, a writer, a consummate story teller, and a keeper of family and community history. Sarah, and later her daughter Mary Alice Salyers Hays, bound the family’s memorabilia into 72 scrapbooks. This blog is an attempt to preserve and share highlights from those  treasured volumes.


Content Posted or Planned for This Blog
Family history – facts and stories about Sarah and her immediate family, plus tales involving her ancestors, cousins, and friends in northern Kentucky and in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Photos – a century of family images taken from the1850s to the 1950s.

Genealogy – family trees and lineages, including the Salyers line back to the Mayflower

Community history – a wealth of information about the day-to-day life in Carrollton, Kentucky and Cincinnati, Ohio; priceless stories of students and teachers in Carrollton schools in the late 1800s; vignettes about the thriving Carrollton-based businesses owned and operated by Sarah’s Irish-immigrant grandfather, John HOWE, and his sons.

Travelogues – tales of trips to visit grandparents in the Price Hill area of Cincinnati. Also, notes from a journey back to the Howland homeplace in Ireland.

Letters! Lots of letters! Not all of them, I promise, but enough to share the facts and flavor of life in northern Kentucky and nearby places before and during Sarah’s time (1883-1955).

Ephemera – at-home cards, newspaper clippings (ads, social notes, obituaries, news), purchase and sales receipts, postcards, event programs, etc.

To learn more about Sarah Eva Howe Salyers and why she inspired this blog, please read "Meet Sarah – Storyteller, Visionary, Keeper of Family Scrapbooks," posted June 18, 2016.


About the Blogger

My name is Frances Rhea Nelson Salyers, a.k.a. Fran. I have been genealogy-obsessed since 2004. My research so far shows that my most recent immigrant ancestor arrived in this country circa 1850-1855. All the other lines may have been in this country (or what would become this country) before 1800 – and some as early as the mid-1600s. My goal is to identify all of my direct lines back to the Revolutionary War era before extending my research to the "old countries," which include Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany, and France.

My first known ancestor to live in my native state of Kentucky appears on the Muhlenberg County tax list in 1799. All of my lines were in Kentucky before 1850, predominantly in the western counties of Union, Crittenden, Davies, Ohio, and especially Muhlenberg. Most of them came here from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee. Most of them (possibly all but one!) stayed. My Kentucky roots run deep!

I am a member of DAR, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Kentucky Genealogical Society, Kentucky Historical Society, and various other groups. I am editor of the KGS quarterly, Bluegrass Roots.

My connection to the 72 scrapbooks? I am the wife of David H. Salyers III, a grandson of Sarah Eva Howe Salyers. To develop this blog, I am going scrapbook by scrapbook. You and I, dear reader, will be exploring this family history together.

Contact: kykinsearcher@gmail.com