Keating Ancestry

  Eleanor "Lillie" Motie and Edward M. Keating 1893 Chicago    Amy and I took a road trip this past Saturday to Davenport Iowa to learn more about our Keating and Motie relatives who lived in this area in the 1840s through the 1890s.  Davenport is a mid-sized city (population around 380,000) located on the eastern border of Iowa along the Mississippi River. It is the largest of the so-called Quad Cities with a great location on rolling bluffs. This part of Iowa was originally inhabited by the Sauk, Fox, and Winnebago peoples.  By the late 1600s, French explorers were in this area as they navigated up and down the river system.   The Davenport area was part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803  and technically became United States territory at that time.  In 1832, the famous Black Hawk war occurred in the area around Davenport and when that war was concluded, American settlers began founding more permanent cities.     French settler Antoine Le Claire gets credit for founding Dave