How important is your phone to your everyday life

[Bill Brown]

I've done the ancestry thing and have traced my family back to the 1500s. One of my 3rd cousins is/was Wyatt Earp. His mother was Virginia Ann Cooksey. My grandmother was a Cooksey with a pretty straight shot back to Virginia Ann. A couple of others. One was the guy who bought the Speedwell that was the ship that sailed with the Mayflower but had to turn back a d one guy was the last governor of the Plymouth Colony.

Bill

[Ed Vette]

It's a different book than most family histories. In my database on the computer, I have roughly 13,000 names. Of my direct ancestors, I have around 700 and have traced my ancestry back to 11 passengers on the Mayflower (many of the others were cousins, aunts and uncles), as well as many fairly famous people (Gov. John Winthrop, Gov. Thomas Dudley, Anne Hutchinson (who incidentally was banned from Massachusetts Bay Colony by Winthrop, and taken away by Major General Humphrey Atherton - another grandfather of mine), Rev. Thomas Hooker, Rev. Richard Mather, Rev. Charles Chauncey (2nd President of Harvard), Rev. Israel Chauncey (one of the 10 original founders of Yale who was voted to be its first President, but he refused because he felt it was his calling to continue pastoring his church), William Tuttle (whose estate was donated to start Yale - then called "Collegiate School" and was the only building used by Yale students for the first 30 years. His picture hangs in the halls of Yale), Capt. Thomas Yale (whose grandson Eli gave the college its name...making him a first cousin), Rev. John Lothroppe/Lathrop, Rev. John Hale who wrote the book ("A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft"), that stopped the witch hysteria (and also makes me a cousin to Nathan "I regret that I have only one life.." Hale), Louis Bevier (a French Huguenot and one of the original patentees of New Paltz..called Neu Pfalz back then, and whose name was Anglicized to Lewis throughout many generations and ended up my father's middle name, which he had no idea why Lewis was important to his family), etc.

So I have written a bio of each. Primarily, that is what I've done...researched my relatives' lives back to shortly before the Revolution or to the day the arrived in America. One of the things I have done, is gone to where the families lived, gotten permission to go into the church where they worshiped, and then I sit in a pew, close my eyes and think about the political issues of the time, who was President, the ages of their kids, what style of clothes they would have been wearing, how they traveled to church...and then go out in the church cemetery to stand in the exact spot as the family as one of them were put in the ground. After a while, you feel as if you know the people. I've spent a lot of time in historical societies and interviewing those who know the history of the area

So when I wrote my book, rather than write it in the format of a typical genealogy, I wrote about the lives of our grandparents and where they crossed lines with my other grandparents, how my grandparents met, what they did for a living, what the area was like when they lived there, etc. My computer can print out my genealogy with the pressing of a few keys, but facts such as dates, locations, siblings, can get very boring in a short while...especially with as many entries as I have in my database. I want whoever reads my book to get a feel of what their ancestors were like, not just a name and date, but their hardships, struggles, and joyous moments. Those straight genealogy books are like reading the "Book of Numbers" in the Bible...which is a real sleep-inducing struggle to read. And I want it so interesting that my descendants from a hundred years from now can't put it down. Also, it might trigger some of my grandchildren to find a love of history that I have - the past is incredible!

Anyway, my book has hundreds of pictures, maps, charts, and many stories about my long gone ancestors and their families and a precise picture of what that locale was like during the years they lived there. Man, and we thought we had it rough...whew. Those who gave their lives in the Revolution and French and Indian Wars, those who were slaughtered by natives. Two stories of my ancestors became the source of Longfellows' Poems and plays, like "The Phantom Ship" in which five of my grandfathers from New Haven perished, and the play in which Maj. Gen. Humphrey Atherton was killed, called "John Endicott"

As far as Ancestry.com goes, they have contacted me many times wanting to send my Gedcom (my entire database) and then pay them a bunch of money per month for the "privilege" of letting them profit from selling my life's work. And it was hard work in which I've invested my life and thousands of dollars on. I've told them, I have 50 years of running around the country gathering photos, information, old deeds, death certificates, digging up old toppled graves stones and resetting them, interviewing dozens of old timers, etc. Not to mention the hundreds of hours spent in the New York Library in Albany straining my eyes to read microfiche and census records that are barely legible. I did it the old-fashioned way, when computers weren't an easy source of information. I've told them that they should pay me for all that information, because I sure as hell wasn't going to pay them to share with the world my lifetime of work so they can make money off it...grrrr

Anyway, here are a few things from my book

A snapshot of the Table of Contents and a couple snapshots of a typical relationship chart to famous cousins, etc. Hope I'm not boring you to tears.









A picture of an early rendition of the book that is spiral bound. I have 8X11.5 hardcovers for libraries and close family members that are being produced. I am having about 50 made that are 9X7 spiral bound to give to grandkids (and a great-grandson in my case), nieces and nephews, etc. I write in the opening of my book that I have all this information and these people are family and the only one who even knows all this stuff is me...and if I die tomorrow, I take it all to the grave with me



This is a typical introduction to one of my family ancestors and how and when they met, where they moved to, and what they did for a living. This is not their whole life story, just an example of how I put my book together with maps, charts, stories, etc












Anyway, as you can see...this is my life's obsession and my legacy after I'm nothing more than a picture on a wall somewhere that eventually ends up in a box in an attic 

That's amazing Ric! Wow!

[Ed Vette]

I've done the ancestry thing and have traced my family back to the 1500s. One of my 3rd cousins is/was Wyatt Earp. His mother was Virginia Ann Cooksey. My grandmother was a Cooksey with a pretty straight shot back to Virginia Ann. A couple of others. One was the guy who bought the Speedwell that was the ship that sailed with the Mayflower but had to turn back a d one guy was the last governor of the Plymouth Colony.

Bill

I could never go that far back, being from Italy. I did find out that I have 20% connections to the Aegean Islands.