People & Places

Life, locations and lineage on the Oregon Trail

Genealogy & Family Research

Pioneers wrote of their travels to Oregon, California, Utah, Montana, and other western locations in diaries, letters, remembrances, and newspaper articles. These accounts have survived in libraries and private collections. Research genealogy and ancestry at Paper-Trail.org

Trail Stories

Most of the trail stories which appear on our website are the work of Dr. Robert Munkres, our resident historical expert. Many of these articles first appeared in the Tombstone Epitaph.

These trail stories may be downloaded for personal reading convenience or to be used in the classroom. For all other uses you must first obtain permission.

Emigrant Profiles

The accounts of emigrants offered in this section are individual stories about individual emigrants. They have been culled from published sources and also submitted by descendants of these emigrants who wanted to share the stories of their emigrant ancestors.

These stories are not intended to be representative of the emigrant experience as a whole. A wide variety of additional emigrant journals and reminiscences are available through the OCTA Store.

Trail Sites

OCTA works to place interpretive signs at significant sites and remaining graves along the emigrant trails. Some of these efforts have been catalogued in our popular book, Graves and Sites on the Oregon and California Trails: A Chapter in OCTA's Efforts to Preserve the Trails by Randy Brown and Reg Duffin.

The book provides background information about sites, the text of markers placed there, along with valuable directions for reaching each of the sites along with the phone numbers and contact information for the landowners on which the sites sit. The book is available from the OCTA Store.

Articles

These articles were generously shared by Dr. Jim Tompkins, who works closely with the End of the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center in Oregon City, Oregon. If you would like more information, visit their History Library.

These articles may be downloaded for personal reading convenience or to be used in the classroom. For all other uses you must first obtain permission.

Gravesites

It has been estimated that one in ten emigrants died during the crossing. Most of these graves were hastily-dug because few emigrants had the time to mark the graves of the deceased. In most cases, graves were marked with little more than a simple wooden board. Nevertheless, some emigrants fashioned more elaborate markers from the materials at hand such as native rocks or, in one notable instance, a wagon rim. A number of these emigrant graves can still be found along the trails and through the dedicated research of some OCTA volunteers, the history of the deceased has been reconstructed.