Notes

A word about privacy:

I do not place info on this web site about people with birth dates that post date 1920. In fact, I'm rather leery about placing anything that post dates 1900 unless I'm fairly sure that the individual(s) involved are deceased. My grandmother was born in 1899 and just died in 1999 so I don't find a 100-year privacy period to be unreasonable. I also do not give this info out privately. If someone chooses to share their more recent family info with me, I treat it as carefully as I do my own. If it is okay with that researcher, I will give his/her address out to those people who contact me looking for info about that family line, and then let them decide how comfortable they are in sharing.

A word or two about accuracy and source documentation:

I'm a firm believer in doing your own research. It not only gives you a greater thrill of discovery but it also provides a certain degree of verification on the info others have gathered previously in their search. Personal computers and the internet have opened up vast resources for those of us in quest of our roots, but it has also made available like never before, a quagmire of shoddily researched and mostly undocumented family trees. The sad fact is, way too many people have been taking what they find on some of the various CDs and genealogy web sites as gospel and running with it. In their hurry to make a connection and add another generation, they're not even bothering to check if what they've found is logical (let alone reliable) or even for the correct family line, before passing that misinformation on to someone else and thus perpetuating the errors.

I've tried my best to give exact names, dates and locations when I felt I had found source documentation to back it up, yet still provide any theoretical knowledge I may have that might help in the search for further clues. So, when I list a date as "abt." or a location as "possibly", it means that info is only a theory to be worked with and not to be taken as the last word on the subject. I've drawn some rather tenuous conclusions in some noted cases on this site so please don't arbitrarily make those theories into facts without further research.

If you are looking for source documentation regarding a certain name, date, location, or event I have listed on these pages, please e-mail me with your question and I'll do my best to locate where I found that info. In some cases I might be able to provide an actual copy of something, like a census page, but in other cases I either don't have a copy myself, just transcribed info, or the document is a hundred pages long. In most cases though, I can at least provide you with a heads-up as to where to look, such as what county in what state has that marriage record, or in what book I found that particular baptism date.

All of the info on this site is as accurate as I can make it as of the last updated date. But I'm not infallible and there are dozens of different ways an error could have crept in somewhere. I hope you'll contact me if your info differs from mine in some way so we might investigate further. Genealogy is rarely an exact science, and info on this site is subject to change as soon as more and/or better evidence is found.

Here's to hoping you find something helpful on this web site. Best of luck in your research!