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The Reason for this Web Site
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February 13 2000 @ 19:06
How I got into Genealogy
It all started one day in February, 1998. My daughter came home from school wanting some information about witches because she was doing a project on them. I told her that a family tradition was that one of her ancestors, a Samuel Wardwell, was killed in the Salem witch hunts. I really didn't know how, or if, he was related, let alone if he was killed as a witch. I said "Let's look it up on the Web!". So we brought up our Yahoo! home page and typed in "Wardwell" and hit the submit button. Well wouldn't you know it, we immediately struck pay dirt. But what caught my eye straightaway was the subsequent listing. Embedded in the description here was the phrase "Ray Wardwell". I thought to myself, "Isn't that my great-grandfather's name, and if so, what is it doing listed on the Web?". We'd stumbled into a family tree report that had been posted on the web. It happened to trace the Wardwells from New England arrival down to my great-grandfather's generation. At the time, I was completely ignorant of the web as a genealogical data repository. I also had no real desire to know anything regarding my family history anyway. My brother had done a little ancestral hunting about 20 years prior but it hadn't stimulated any passion in me let alone retrieved much in the way of information. I guess the timing was right because I've been hooked ever since - so much so in fact, I've amassed an outstanding library of books and other documents. My father's ancestry has been fairly easy to figure out and in doing so, we verified some oral traditions while dispelling others. My father had thought his line of Bartons had come from Ireland. It turned out to be somewhat true, but it was his Conway line that had come from there. The fact is, the Bartons have been here quite a while. There had also been a tradition of Native American blood, but there is still some controversy there, so nothing has been proven one way or the other - thus the oral tradition lives on! My mother's ancestry, on the other hand, has been a tougher nut to crack. She was raised as a foster child, barely knew her father and never knew her mother because her mother died when she was very young. She didn't even find her mother's maiden name until 1996 when she got a copy of her mother's death certificate. From what we've gathered so far, it turns out my parents were cousins several times over (though far removed) as they both have many common ancestors. Marcy's ancestry is another story altogether. She has Jewish roots from eastern Europe for the most part and I'm not very confident that we'll figure this one out in our lifetimes.
Duane Barton |
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