One of the things that has been most helpful in my genealogical investigations is the tremendous family tree that my grandfather and his uncle researched and created. The tree had to have been created between about 1900 and 1913, as my grandfather was just then in his 20s and Uncle John W. C. Davis (grandfather’s uncle) died in 1913. At any rate, they must have collected every scrap of information they could find from every living family member, every family bible and from every letter they could find that discussed family members, dead and alive. The tree is extensive, covering generations back into the early 1600s and very broad, covering the lines from Lee, Turberville, Corbin, Beale, Hoomes and Davis. There is pretty good collateral coverage into the families that married into these also. It is a marvelous document and a very rich resource for family genealogy.
The bad news is, the original document was burned when Ayrfield was destroyed by fire in January, 1994. Luckily for us, the original had been copied before that and the copy survived somehow. The tree was quite large, fitting on a sheet of heavy drafting paper that was about 36 inches wide and somewhere around 60 inches long. When it was copied, the duplicating machine could not acommodate the whole thing at once, so it was copied in two sections onto two different sheets of paper. In order to see the whole tree, both sheets had to be unrolled. This was inconvenient, and in some cases confusing, since the two sheets had a considerable overlap area. Also, the very top and very bottom of the original tree were not copied. We may never know exactly what was there, although we do know who belongs there.
I got the idea that I could duplicate the tree and restore it to a single sheet of paper. This would accomplish two things: it would restore the tree to a single, large document and it would allow better visibility of some of the faint or missing text and lines that did not copy well from the original. At first I tried using paper, assembling many sheets of art paper. I realized that was more of a trial effort to see if I could do it. Then I got hold of some plastic drafting film from my father’s office at Ayrfield (separate outbuilding that still stands) and cut a sheet of that large enough to contain the whole tree. I traced the entire tree as it existed on the copy I had. Then I penciled in the lines that were very faint or missing on the copy. I used some research that another family researcher had made available to me to verify the names on the tree and to restore the family names to the generation bands that had not copied successfully from the original when it was photocopied. On the original, these generation bands were color coded, and the darker colors copied as solid black, obscuring the name labels.
Now the tree is restored to a single sheet (36 x 51 inches). I made no attempt to correct misspellings or abberations, electing to preserve the original content and style of the original as much as possible. Then I found a document copy place that could take the entire film and copy it to plain paper so I could provide copies to my family members. I made 10 copies and provided some of them to immediately interested family members. I am delighted with the results and hope this version can preserve the research my grandfather did for at least another hundred years!
