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Posted by Marian Walters
on 12/24/2005, 4:27 pm
152.163.101.13
I heard this story from my Grandmother, Rose Ellen Newton Warner, and also seperately from her cousin Lillian McKune.
There were two brothers in western Pennsylvania, Thomas and James McCune, in the early 1800s. They were the sons of Andrew McCune and his wife, Elisabeth Johnson Gist. THey worked at a furnace, and there was trouble at work. They were charged with getting the workers back to working. THey did what they could, but there was a large barrel-chested man on the landing between the two furnaces and he began fighting with them. In the course of the fight, the man fell into the furnace and was killed. The two brothers fled from PA. and used their mother's name for awhile saying they were the Gist brothers. They eventually came to Nelson Co, KY and married Wimsatt girls, at that time using their correct names. After their mother had passed on, their father came to KY also. One brother later moved across the river to Indiana.
This family story has been in our family for many years, and is said to explain the quick temper that may have been inherited.
I have not been able to locate them using the name of Gist (pronounced as Guest) nor to verify their mother. Andrew is with Thomas and his family on the census in the county of Nelson, KY, 1850. James and his family are also nearby in the area of Gethesthame. I would be interested to find out information of the incident in PA. Both boys were born in MD in 1785 and 1789. They were in Nelson County as early as in 1810.
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