We have been researching on the Hess Family over the past week and a half.  We began our research with John Hess (b. 1804, d. 1883) and his wife Anna Jones (b. 1808, d. 1889).  Both of them were born, lived and died in Washington County, Pennsylvania.  We could not find any documentation / proof of John Hess’ parents but were able to track one of his descendant lines to Crawford / Neosho Counties in Kansas.  We completed our search with writing a biography on John’s son, William Wesley Hess (b. 1839, d. 1911).

Our online research for Western Pennsylvania took a lot of digging and e-messages to a few folks to really make any headway.  The most helpful sites were: “Genealogy in Washington County” (http://www.chartiers.com/), “Washington County History Link Page” (http://www.ourfamilyhistories.com/hsdurbin/washingtonco.html), USGenWeb Archives for Pennsylvania (http://www.usgwarchives.net/pa/pafiles.htm), and  “Historic Pittsburgh” (http://digital.library.pitt.edu/p/pitttextall/).  For our Kansas online search, the most useful site was “Kansas Trails” (http://genealogytrails.com/kan/ ).   This state also took a lot bits and pieces to make any solid headway in our search.  Also, we could not find any online newspaper collections for the area of research for both states.