To learn more about Fort Amanda, please go HEREculture.ohio.gov, and HEREohiohistory.org.
To learn more about this area, the Great Black Swamp, please go HEREhistoricperrysburg.org.
To learn more about the Shawnee Nation, please go HEREhome.kc.rr.com/utosi.

Where were the Cochrans, my ancestors, during this genocidal insanity?

By all known accounts, the Cochran clan shared a very close relationship with the local Shawnee people.

Their relationship began indirectly in 1817 when Andrew Russell, his wife (pregnant with Susanna Russell), and four children arrived at the Fort Amanda blockhouse, the Great Black Swamp area, in the fall of 1817. (Andrew’s daughter, Juliann, married James Cochran, circa 1825.)

The entire Russell family fell deathly ill with ague, a malarial disease, and the Shawnee tribe took the family in their care, nursed them to health, and got them through the winter.

My family's oral history records that without Shawnee help the Russell family surely would have died that winter....

This graphic is part of a 200-photo, 45-minute video documentary on one of the first white families to homestead northwest Ohio in the early 1800s, the Great Black Swamp, Defiance Trail, Auglaize River, Scott's Crossing, Lima, Elida, Delphos area.

A 30-minute version of the documentary and more than 20 of the restored vintage 1800s 1900s historical photographs may be viewed HEREgballard.net

The free on-line documentary also contains an in-depth 2002 interview of a 76-year-old elder woman which connects the Treaty of Greenville 1795, Indian Removal Act 1830, and Trail of Tears (late 1830s) to her family oral history.