Venango County will be on TVs across the nation as a celebrity with ties to the county’s early pioneers will be featured on the next episode of “Finding Your Roots” on PBS.
The episode — titled “Dreamers One and All” — will explore the ancestries of actress Sharon Stone, who is from Crawford County, and model Chrissy Teigen. The show premiers at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
To turn up information on the celebrity’s ancestors in the area, “Finding Your Roots” turned to the Venango County Historical Society for research assistance.
Doris Eckel, a researcher at the Historical Society, in February said the producers of “Finding Your Roots” sent an email inquiry to the Historical Society requesting “very simple research” regarding some wills and death records, with the promise of payment and crediting the Historical Society.
When she turned in what she had found, Eckel said, the research requests “snowballed from there and just kept coming.”
Over the next several months, Eckel said, she was in frequent email communication with Enrique Figueroa and his team at “Finding Your Roots,” sometimes getting four or five emails a day.
“They were very detailed, very careful,” Eckel said. “It was amazing. ... Anytime I would send him anything, he would read through it right then and ask questions immediately.”
Her quest for records led her beyond the Historical Society’s collection to the Pennsylvania Room in the Franklin Library, where she found Sylvia Coast had already compiled much of the research that she had been seeking. She also turned to the Heritage Society of Oil City in the Oil City Library.
Finding marriage records, cemetery records, naturalization papers, wills, deeds, orphan court records and other documentation that provided pieces to the puzzle kept Eckel busy.
She was asked to find the earliest deeds for each of roughly a half-dozen early Venango County families. She also received requests for information relating to several local oil companies and about what it was like to work at Polk State Center in the 1940s.
Ties to Cooperstown and Sugarcreek were found, Eckel said. At one point, she sent the producers of “Finding Your Roots” pictures of some graves at Pioneer Cemetery in Franklin.
“The very last contact I had was in August; the producer called and asked how you pronounce Raymilton,” she said.
Researching for “Finding Your Roots” was a first for Eckel, who estimates she spent about 20 hours working on it.
“I don’t know how much Venango County research will be in the show,” Eckel said, and that she believes her research will be evident when a massive family tree will be rolled out at the end of the episode.
“It was fun, it was rewarding and it was interesting,” Eckel said of the project.
