Seward County Nebraska

We did some "research" on long time Garland, NE, families today in this 535-page book "SEWARD COUNTY, NEBRASKA" published by the Seward County Historical Society in 1982.  Seward native Jane (Ramsey) Graff served as Chairperson of a large number of people on three committees to collect information for the book.  She writes in the "Forward" to the book that at the Seward 4th of July celebration in 1981:  "A large number of people exhibited samples of their family research projects--history, pictures, charts, trees and personal publications." Later that month a representative from the Taylor Publishing Co. met with the Seward County Historical Society Board and decided to launch the project.  An invitation was extended to everyone in the County to contribute information to be included.  The results were great since it was a way to leave genealogy information for future generations without any cost to contributors.  We had just moved back to Nebraska when the material was being collected.  We were occupied with restoring an old farm house, getting established in new jobs and didn't participate.  Our only mention in the book is on p. 114 under William and Emma (Watts) Flowerday.  They were Elaine's paternal grandparents.  Erma Zillig Flowerday, a daughter-in-law, wrote of Flowerdays coming to America from England as young people, marrying in 1895 and having a family of 6 boys and 3 girls.  Elaine's Father Albert was the oldest, and Erma was the wife of Theodore, one of the younger children.  In the story, Erma included a couple great family pictures and went on to list the names of all of William and Emma's children, grandchildren, who they married and their children.  That is where "Elaine married Verlon Vrana, their family, Verlon, Tim, Carolyn and Jon", appear.  We didn't find much on the families we intended to research this afternoon.  But as often happens when we pick up the book, we learned a lot about people, places, and things that we hadn't known.