Annual Review 2024
Finishing What Was Started 25 Years Ago

Custer Presentation, Hardin, Montana, June	Custer Presentation, Gettysburg, PA, August	Custer Presentation, New Rumley, Ohio, December
New Research/Content - Mike Shonsey and the Johnson County Cattle War	Research/Travel - Family Soldiers at the Civil War Battle of Antietam	Research/Travel - Philemon Armstrong and Chief Crazy Horse
Research/Travel - National Archives, Washington, DC	Research/Travel - Arlington National Cemetery	Research/Travel - Philippi, West Virginia

On May 7, 2025, our Minerd.com website will turn 25 years of age and reach its silver anniversary.

As exciting as that will be, I have to keep in mind that a wise mentor once advised me to “be a finisher.” This type of person completes what they start, not allowing the tyranny of the urgent to interfere with what is truly important. Over the past two-plus years, I’ve tried with urgency to complete a comprehensive mapping of our family headcount, stories, photos and impact on Americana. We are getting nearer to the end game of having a record of a large majority of names and biographies as close to the present day as possible.

Entering into 2024, there were 37 Minerd-Minard-Miner-Minor biographies on the site needing to be substantially completed, and many more of the Gaumer-Gomer-Garmer and Younkin-Younken-Youngkin-Youngken lines. While much of that work was accomplished during the year, more remains to be done. This task seemingly is endless. My development of biographies takes place nearly every single day, whether excavating data online, traveling to sites where stories are housed, speaking to groups or engaging with more than 1,000 cousins on our private family Facebook page. Sometimes a single biography can take two to three weeks to fully research, write and illustrate. Each time a cousin or spouse dies, I incorporate their obituaries into their family's webpage. See the very end of this report for a recap of new and expanded biographies and feature pages during the year.

Somerset (PA) Daily American, 1992

This vision began long before this website was created. When I was age 31, in 1992, I wrote a guest article for the Somerset (PA) Daily American, headlined "Mapping Uncharted Early Minerd Family." My opening read as follows:

The exploration and mapping of the unknown has a knack for capturing the public's imagination in fascinating ways. For instance, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy are funding the Human Genome Project to map and interpret all of the three billion genetic building blocks which make up DNA molecules. Similarly, the National Aeronautical and Space Administration has spent billions of dollars to launch the satellite Magellan to orbit and map the surface of venus. On a much smaller and more local scale, there is a growing movement to map a single Somerset County family over a 200-year span by identifying and recording its members...

All these years later, while many gaps remain, Minerd.com is nearing a stage of "completion" that should endure well into the future and hopefully attract many more followers.

Is all of this time, effort and cost worth it? I think so. One cousin wrote last year that "My mother was the black sheep of the family, so we never learned much about my family history. I learned more about it from minerd.com than I ever learned from my close family. Since we were never really a part of my greater family, nor learned much of anything about where we came from, I always felt pretty alone and out of step. I’m very grateful for the site, it gives me more a sense of belonging, and a feeling of being more a part of society."

This report summarizes some of the highlights of the past year’s work to finish this site.

On June 16, 2024, Christopher Miner, Joy Campbell and Roy Ravenscraft clicked to join our private Minerd-Minard-Miner-Minor family Facebook page, bringing the grand total number of members over the top to 1,001. As of this writing, the page has 1,059 members all across the nation and overseas. It serves as a living, dynamic, collective voice of the sprawling family.

Join our private Facebook page

It's still very gratifying to see that many of the members form Facebook friendships within and comment on each other's posts. It's also fascinating when cousins see longtime friends on the page and say, "I didn't know we were related!" It represents the true magic of the work.

The MMMM Facebook page is a forum for sharing genealogy information, discoveries, heirlooms, photos, stories, obituaries, queries, prayer requests and more. Members know that all posts must be reasonable and civilized -- with no libel, defamation or rants about specific individuals -- and absolutely no political debate. I also frequently contribute content to the National Younkin Younken Youngkin Family Reunion page on Facebook.

Our companion social media platform, the Minerd.com Blog, published 15 posts in 2024. This led to 1,388 pageviews during the year, down 117 from 2023.

Month-to-month Minerd.com Blog pageviews in 2024

Title slides of my talks about the Custer connection with our family

A Year of Public Facing Custer Presentations  - As a follow-up to articles I published some years ago, I received invitations to speak at three different conferences about General George Armstrong's brother, Captain Thomas Ward Custer, and the captain's son, our cousin Thomas C. Custer. This provided national exposure for our proprietary, award-winning content about the Custers' connection to our family and helped deepened relationships with Custer experts and scholars from around the world.  The first was "Tommy of Tontogany: Thomas W. Custer's Unknown Son" at the Custer Battlefield Historical & Museum Association conference in Hardin, MT. The CBHMA will publish a related article in its Proceedings of the 2024 Symposium. In August, I traveled to Gettysburg, PA to present "Speckled Legacy: Tom Custer in American Pop Culture" at the annual conference of the Little Big Horn Associates. Then in December, I was honored to deliver the "Speckled Legacy" talk at the Custer Memorial Association meeting in the Custers' birthplace in New Rumley, OH.           Siobhan Fallon's YouTube documentary about Capt. Thomas Ward Custer - view part 1 and part 2 With author Siobhan Fallon in Gettysburg Thankfully, the reviews were very positive. In the LBHA Newsletter, Jim Hessler said that the talk "walked us through Tom Custer's checkered history in popular culture and showed how Tom remains in George's shadow." Rev. Fr. Vincent Heier wrote in the CBHMA's The Battlefield Dispatch that "Even though the Captain never recognized the child, Miner offered some very compelling historical evidence for the relationship." The CMA Custer's Courier noted that the "program covered how Thomas Custer... who was almost ignored after his death at Little Bighorn has gained some notoriety in the twenty-first century. His program showed the checkered history of Tom and how he remained in George's shadow. This was done through a survey of articles, books and films which have influenced Americans' limited perceptions of Tom as a brawler, heavy drinker and womanizer up to now." Our Custer content was used with permission in a two-part YouTube video series by author and historian Siobhan Fallon. See part 1, "Thomas W. Custer: First Soldier to Win the Medal of Honor Twice" and part 2, "Tom Custer's Last Stands: Wild Bill Hickok, Rain-in-the-Face, & Lost Love." She referred to Minerd.com as an "incredible website" that contains "a wealth of information" and as well as "really fantastic details and research." It was a great privilege to meet Siobhan at the LBHA conference in Gettysburg and for her to consent to having our photograph taken together. 2024 Ravenscroft/Ravenscraft Reunion at Hutchinson, PA

2024 Shroyer Reunion - courtesy Mia Lizzy Sarnelli

Family Reunions - For a second year, I was humbled to be invited to reunions on back-to-back days in Fayette County, PA, the epicenter of our family's growth since 1791. The first was the annual Ravenscroft/Ravenscraft reunion at Hutchinson, PA, at the invitation of Bobbi Marzullo, of the family of Charles J. and Sarah Jane (Rankin) Addis. The next day, thanks to the kindness of Shawn and Brittany Shroyer, I went to the annual Shroyer Reunion in Connellsville, PA, of the family of Jacob A. and Laura Belle (Younkin) Shroyer.

Our next MMMM national reunion will be held the weekend of June 20-22, 2025, highlighted by the Saturday picnic at Camp Christian in Mill Run, PA, on the theme of "A Reunion of Strangers." Hope to see you there.

Research, research and more research is the core activity in writing biographies. These deep dives into the past could not be possible without access to fabulous online repositories of documents and search engines –Ancestry.com, FamilySearch.org, FindAGrave.com, Google and Newspapers.com. Equally essential have been the many warm-hearted cousins and friends of the family who generously share their personal knowledge and photo images.

Nancy Tabb, Johnson County Library

As one prime example, Karen Kester of Fort Madison, IA, not one of our cousins, gave me permission to publish her photographs of the graves of Iowa pioneers Nathan and Susan (Abbott) Miner. Then, out of the goodness of her heart, she offered to find and share news obituaries of this couple and their offspring which have brought these forgotten souls back to life a little.

During a second annual trip to Montana in June, I had the pleasure of touring the Little Big Horn and Rosebud battlefields. In a swing into Wyoming, I met with Laurel Foster of the Hoofprints of the Past Museum in Kaycee and Nancy Tabb of the Johnson County Library in Buffalo, gathering information and images for my lengthy report, "Mike Shonsey and the Johnson County Cattle War." Then in South Dakota, I visited the Crazy Horse Museum honoring this legendary Oglala Lakota chief who clashed at the Fetterman Massacre and Wagon Box Fight with U.S. soldiers including our Philemon D. Armstrong.

In August, I made my 21st visit to the National Archives in Washington, DC. My time there focused on reviewing and copying Civil War pension records for MMMM soldiers Corwin Thomas Carter, Johnston Maxwell, Melville Maxwell and Thomas Benjamin Roby. In the Younkin-Younken-Youngkin-Youngken clan, I copied records for soldiers Perry Bahl, George Bellinger, Frederic Lord Chapman, William Long Haupt, Dr. Abner Daniel Kimball, James Allen Linville, Uriah H. Parvin, Charles Paxton, Robert Shannon Porterfield, William Stroh, Charles Abraham Van Pelt, Henry Younkin, Jerome Wilson Younkin and John Cyrus Killian Youngkin.

I love this place, Arlington National Cemetery

We now know of 229 Civil War soldiers in the extended MMMM clan and 192 in the YYYY family.

A hot August afternoon walk through Arlington National Cemetery allowed me to photograph grave markers of MMMM cousins Harry Bell, William Clark Oliver and Lenard Shipley – and on the Younkin side Donald Bradner, John Perry Heckel, Albert E. Henderson and William Alexander Hood Jr.

In the quest to identify the names and capture the stories of all the known branches of our vast family, we have been tracking the known deaths of MMMM cousins or spouses in the timespan from July 1, 2000 to today. During the year, we reached a 6,000th death, and that number continues to grow, to 6,473 as of today. No epidemic is at work. Rather, the data is evidence of the normal cycle of life, set against our extended family's enormous size and the aging of the baby boom generation.

Among the projects I hope to more deeply tackle in 2025 are studies of Younkin cousins Gen. Herman Haupt ("Lincoln's Railroad Man") and John Henry "Sebastian" Haupt III, an Alabama cotton planter and slave owner in the years before the Civil War. I'd also like to publish special pages remembering all the kin who lived in particular communities with large populations of cousins, such as Sacramento, CA and Canton, OH -- all of the family burials at Arlington National Cemetery -- all the places on the field where cousins saw action at the Civil War battles of Gettysburg and Fredericksburg -- cousins who earned the Purple Heart -- and cousin-members of small community congregations such as the Church of God in Kingwood, PA, where I can cross-check membership directories with names on this website.

I semi-retired at the start of 2024, still doing work in the mornings for a handful of longtime clients and spending afternoons and evenings engaged in genealogy and non-profit causes. In this new stage of my own personal development, I'm honored to serve in leadership roles with several organizations which are helping me gain valuable experience. It is my hope that my learnings will transfer knowledge to the future of our family-wide family history experiment.

I’m now in my second year as a board director of the Beaver County (PA) Foundation, an organization with $12 million in assets which reinvests in the community each year in the form of scholarships, community renewal and development initiatives.

As well, I wear three hats within the Beaver Area Heritage Foundation governance team as a board member, chair of the board of trustees of the Beaver Area Heritage Museum and on the operating committee of Beaver Station Cultural and Event Center . In December, this organization again was ranked in the Pittsburgh Business Times list of the "Top 25 Largest Pittsburgh area Museums and Attractions," as measured by admissions, and the largest in our county. In April, it was my honor to travel to our state capitol of Harrisburg to help accept a “best in show” award for our museum’s award-winning exhibit and video documentary, “Saint or Sinner: The Complicated Legacy of Senator Matthew Stanley Quay.”

In Harrisburg with fellow Heritage Museum trustee Beth Spence and PA Museums executive director Rusty Baker, to accept a statewide "best in show" award for our Saint or Sinner? exhibit and documentary

The museum’s trustees are advancing an ambitious agenda over the next several years to help celebrate the facility’s belated silver anniversary and capture the public enthusiasm of the “America 250” celebration in 2026 and beyond. Already this year, the museum interior has undergone a beautiful interior repainting for the first time since 1998. We're using the opportunity to refresh some of the permanent displays to potentially include fascinating artifacts that have not before been exhibited and recall highlights of previous years’ “rotating” displays.

In August, the museum will hold its “From Silver to Gold Gala” to honor three local business and media leaders for their enduring financial and advocacy support. Plans are underway to mount an “Other Truths” exhibit for 2026, focusing on the legacy of the Treaty of our town’s Fort McIntosh from the widely differing perspectives of the Delaware Lenape Indians and the U.S. Government.

Revolutionary War artifact from Fort McIntosh

Thanks to our friends at my former employer, the engineering giant Michael Baker International, a team of archaeologists and cultural resources specialists is conducting a first-ever analysis of tens of thousands of fort artifacts excavated in the early 1970s but then shelved. Our goal someday is to greatly expand our permanent display of the fort and become more of a center for research and scholarship. As well, a Fort McIntosh Task Force is evaluating the actual site to develop a strategy to design and obtain funding for significant visual and structural upgrades.

As I wrote last year, the time is coming when I will step away from all of this. The Minerd.com website and family research library/archives will either need to be retired into oblivion or kept intact for future generations. I spent 2023-2024 studying what steps are needed to make this happen and surround myself with trusted advisors who can provide guidance. The solution needs to be well-funded through an endowment. It must find the right people who can keep our website and social media assets online and up-to-date. It must include a secure facility for housing, curating and accessing physical archives which could also serve as an exhibit and meeting space. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s “Factory” in New York, and artist and photographer Peter Beard’s opulent, three-dimensional murals, I can envision our collections being used in a creative studio suite for advanced storytelling of videos, documentaries, books and articles, podcasts and visual creations that create excitement and generate revenue.Will you step up and offer to help make this happen?

--Mark A. Miner
Founder, Minerd.com
March 15, 2025