Welcome to to my genealogy blog. Things are just getting started. I decided to use this as a way to share what I have been finding out, and as a way for me to record results of research and my genealogical pokings around on the internet. Often I find out things and then forget to write down what I did. Cryptic notes written while in the library that were sure to jog my memory later often served merely to remind me how poorly I remember things. If I write about them here, I can record things that are fresh in my mind, and can share them with others who may have some of the missing pieces of the puzzle too.
Discussions of family and their origins seemed to be a great part of many of the seasonal gatherings my immediate family attended. We would visit Aunt Nell in her nursing home at Horn Harbor and talk for hours about family she knew who had passed on long ago. Gene, Wilbur, Robert and Harvey would come to Kinsale and stay with Cousin Elva Allen occasionally in the summer, and we’d go visit, sitting on the porch when it wasn’t too hot, listening to stories they told of growing up in Kinsale in the Teens, Twenties and Thirties. Thanksgiving dinner at Robert and Wilbur’s place at Gloucester was always a source of entertainment, often for the stories they told of some of my father’s escapades in his youth, or of how Grandfather Marvin Murphy stayed with them at The Grove before he married. And then several years later, the Christmas or Thanksgiving gatherings at Westminster Canterbury continued to draw the “usual suspects” to talk over old times – Robert and his siblings, of course, but also Dots Murphy Thompson, his sister in law. Uncle Fred Whittaker would make an appearance once ever ten years or so, coming up from Odessa, Texas to visit the kin in Virginia. Always there were stories from the years before WWII.
I intend to arrange this site as a series of pages for the different branches of my family organized around the central blog. The blog will be more of a discussion of activity and findings, while the pages will start out as rudimentary family sketches, gradually gaining shape and character as more and more information on each is unearthed and integrated into the story. I hope my many scattered and not-so-scattered relations will add comments and information to assist. I do not think this will be a hurried project, and I hope you will pardon my excursions into other interests for periods of time. I’ll return with some new angle of attack each time.
Alright….the champagne bottle has been smashed. Onward, the journey!