Using Tech for Book Marketing

Kate Gingold from Sprocket Websites Kate has been building websites with her husband Don since 1996 for all sorts of clients, including authors.

Kate regularly writes about online marketing for Sprocket Websites and provides tips and techniques for entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Since being an author today is not really different from being an entrepreneur with a small business, most of those tips are just as useful to authors.

Kate is an author herself. She writes books on local history, including the award-winning "Ruth by Lake and Prairie," a fictionalized account of the true story of Great Lake pioneering to the shores of Chicago and beyond to found Naperville, Illinois.

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Kate Gingold Host / Wednesday, August 18, 2021

/ Categories: Brief History

From the 1874 DuPage Atlas – Joseph S. Ferry

Joseph Sanford Ferry arrived in DuPage County in 1838 as a nine-year-old when his parents, Sylvanus and Rhoda, moved from New York via Terra Haute. The family lived in Warrenville at first until his father bought his own land. Sylvanus, unfortunately, died not long after.

When Joseph was sixteen, his uncles helped the family purchase fifty-three acres of farmland. Within a few years, Joseph had sold that farm and bought another more than twice the size. During that time, Joseph married and started a family. Joseph didn’t have access to much education in his youth, but his wife, Sophronia, was a school teacher. In order for the children to attend school, they moved into the city of Aurora a few years later and Joseph sold the farm.

While the Civil War certainly was an unfortunate influence, Aurora grew rapidly in the mid-1800s, aided by the many factories that were powered by the Fox River. Joseph became a builder and developer while living in the city and “purchased residence property and vacant lots on which he erected several neat dwelling houses.”

The expansive “farm scene” depicted in the atlas engraving is probably the farm he moved to in 1873 since the atlas was published in 1874. According to a map in the same atlas, Joseph’s acreage was southwest of the town of Naperville. Northwest of Naperville is another plot labeled “M Ferry,” which belonged most likely to Melancthon, Joseph’s brother. Melancthon was married three times and sired a number of children. His family farmed the homestead until the 1970s and inspired the name of Ferry Road. There was also a sister, Louisa, who never married.

Joseph Ferry only remained on the farm in the engraving until 1890 when he and his wife, Sophronia, moved back into Aurora. Sophronia taught school in DuPage County as well as in Vermont and New York, where she lived before her marriage. Both her great-grandfather, Col. Seth Warner, and her grandfather, Israel Putnam Warner, were Revolutionary War veterans, although Israel was only a nine-year-old messenger and scout during the war.

http://genealogytrails.com/ill/dupage/bigwoodcem.html

Israel and his wife Esther settled in DuPage County and their daughter, also named Esther, was Sophronia’s mother. In 2008, Israel’s headstone in the Big Woods Cemetery, Warrenville, was rediscovered, restored, and then rededicated in a 2008 ceremony. This was a big deal because, unlike the eastern states, there are very few graves of Revolutionary War veterans in Illinois.

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