Here are some — but certainly not all — of the wonderful surnames in our family
My starting point, so to speak, is my five grandchildren. My goal is to enable them to see their ancestors, beginning with their parents and moving back through time to the arrival of each line in North America, or as close to that as I can get. For a few I’ve gone back a generation or two prior to their arrival, but not for many.
To help me keep things straight I’ve organized my research around my four grandparents, my wife’s four grandparents, and my two daughters-in-law. That means I’m dividing my research into ten family lines. So while you will be related to many of the ancestors I’m researching and writing about here, many of them won’t be related to you at all. Nonetheless, I think you’ll find their stories interesting. And you could be related — by marriage — very indirectly — if you use your imagination!! (Six degrees of separation theory, and all that) The ten lines are:
William Harvey Inlow and Mabel Cheney — my paternal grandparents
Roy Harp and Cecil Munkers – my maternal grandparents
Richard Robert Max Menzel and Lillian Eggert – paternal grandparents of my wife, Lynn
Robert Harrell and Marguerite Furse – maternal grandparents of my wife, Lynn
Higbee and Swank – our two daughter’s in law birth names (I’m not going to include either their first names or their parent’s first names because they are all still living)
(For more about each of these lines go to “Families” in the navigation menu above)
And we just spread out from there!! I’ve traced many branches of these family lines into the 1600’s and 1700’s…a few lines even into the 1500’s. The most recent immigrants are my wife’s paternal grandparents, Richard Robert Max Menzel (who immigrated from Germany in 1907) and Lillian Eggert (who was a second generation German immigrant. While one daughter-in-law’s family was knee-deep in the Salem witch trials — and arrived in Massachusetts Colony well before that time — she also has great-grandparents who immigrated from Ireland around 1910. The other daughter-in-law has folks who arrived in the Colonies right before 1700, as well as a few who arrived after 1900.
So we are an incredibly diverse lot…coming from all over the place! Arriving at all different times. We are mostly of European ancestry, particularly western European. But both research and DNA show some striking divergences from that overall pattern. I’m really enjoying getting to know these folks, and I hope you will as well. There are many amazing and wonderful people. Of course, there are some outlaws. A couple of genuine scoundrels. The first execution in Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Billingham in 1630, is a relation (he murdered another Pilgrim, if you can imagine that…but I’m not going to tell you now which line he was in…you’ll have to follow the posts!).
If you are interested in helping out with this adventure please let me know. I’d love to collaborate with you.
If you have people, stories, photos, documents or the like to add don’t hesitate to contact me. That’s what makes this family search adventure work. I’m sure many of you have very important “stuff” no one else in the family has, but everyone else in the family would love to see! (Just a few months ago a cousin discovered a 300 year-old family Bible, with lots of records, in a box in the far corner of his father’s storage locker!! What a treasure! Maybe you have something like that. Or maybe you just have a single photo which no one has ever seen before. Every discovery is a treasure in danger of being lost if you don’t share it!
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I have fairly complete family trees on Ancestry.com. I also keep a tree on MyHeritage.com, and frequently add updates on FamilySearch.org. If you are a member of any of those sites, and would like to see one or more of those trees, please contact me. I keep my most up to date research and materials in Legacy Family Tree software on my own computer and I enjoy collaborating with other family historians and genealogists.