Sloss-Mitchell Genealogy
My dad was John Horton Sloss, and my mother Alice Lee Mitchell, known by everyone as Mickey Sloss. I was born in 1947 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they both attended college. Mickey earned an M.S. in Bacteriology, while John, having recently returned from Europe after World War II, was working on his B.S. in Sociology. He went on to earn his PhD. in Public Health, while Mickey spent her working life in research, first with Jonas Salk on the flu vaccine in Ann Arbor, then in the Blood Bank in Pittsburgh, and finally at CWRU Medical School in Cleveland, where she supervised a cancer research lab.
I know a lot about John's side of the family as his St. Louis cousins did a lot of research years ago. Particualary fascinating is my great-grandmother's account of her "Forty Years in Old Mexico". This details their life as coffee growers, and after the the Mexican Revolution, coffee exporters, in Jalapa, Mexico.
The family sychronicity here is that Mickey's father, George Washington Mitchell, took the family to Brazil, where they lived in San Paulo, but also had a coffee plantation/home in the countryside. So coffee is in the family heritage on both sides.
The internet is a great source, there are genealogy forums, state archives, libraries, personal genealogy pages, and some of my best finds have been in Google Books, they, and repeated searches work as they are always adding new material.
Here are some examples of my sources:
Sullivan Blood -
Lincoln Library - Google Books
Col. Alexander Outlaw - Ala. Archives - Sally's Place
Barnabas Horton
Horton Family site - GenForum
Nutting, Longley, Tarbel - Goog Bks Rootsweb Newspaper
Keeler, Stewart - GB
ancestery.com
The two sides of the family came together in St. Louis when my great great grandfather James Long Sloss II (born in Florence, Alabama), married Arabella Blood of St. Louis. Her father, Sullivan Blood (m. Sophie Hall) was a direct paternal descendant of Ricard Blood, who settled at Groton, MA in 1658. James Long Sloss II was the son of a Scots Presbyterian minister. His mother was Letitia Campbell Sloss. Her father Judge David Campbell, and her mother was Elizabeth Outlaw, daughter of Col Alexander Outlaw, so both her father and maternal grandfather fought in the Revolution, including the Battle of Moore's Creek and the Battle of King's Mountain. Both men were involved in the creation of the state of Franklin, and then Tennessee. David Campbell was judge of the Territory South of the Ohio, and was a friend of Thomas Jefferson and adversary of John Sevier. His last post was as