Dear Jürgen,
Thank you for the wonderful web site.
The US state maps with different dates help greatly in tracing the migration of my German immigrant pioneers as they moved into the frontier. Census and land records have them in the wrong counties and townships until you realize that the boundaries were always changing as the states grew in population. Now I can see the condition for each region at the time they lived there.
Parchmans were early settlers in western Pennsylvania (1773), middle Tennessee (1789), northern Mississippi (1819), and eastern Texas (1831) before any of these were states. Boundaries were constantly shifting. Many of the Parchmans are recognized as pioneering citizens.
For example, when the first Parchman (Nicholas) came to western Pennsylvania, he was a soldier in the British war against the French and Indians in 1758. His son, (Peter, an Indian scout), was wounded by an Indian and another son (presumably) was killed and scalped. At that time, the territory around Pittsburgh was French and then claimed by both Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Also, the youngest person to do die at the battle of The Alamo in 1836 was a 15-year-old Parchman descendant named William Philip King (mother was Permelia Parchman). He went in place of his father to defend The Alamo so his father could care for the family. The Alamo is sacred to Texans. They named a county (King County) for William Philip.
The maps help see all this according to the time of the ancestors.
Gerry Parchman