I became interested in Our Family Tree, when my grandchildren, were studying this in grade school and started asking questions that I couldn't answer.  I was rather embarrassed since I had not made any notes of any of the bits and pieces of information handed down, very few of the ancestors were eager to talk about the family history.  Most all families have a few skeletons in their closets, but 50 years ago there were very few references to them.

So I embarked on the journey to see what I could find out about my grandparents, but of course it was late as all the Grandparents were gone and so was my father, the brothers and sisters that were left were so much younger than he, they knew very little more than I knew myself.

My first stop was the Mormon Family Library, a cousins daughter said she had learned of some information recorded there and I did hit pay dirt.  Two distant relative's one from California and one from Ada, Oklahoma had gathered information for about Fifty years and recorded it on microfilm with the Library.  I was so excited about it all I couldn't be still until I had it all entered in my computer.

But of course then I began to notice there was a couple of vacancies with two of the important people of my family line, so here i am still hunting information, and probably until I get too old to work at it, as I have decided you never really get through.

The two distant cousins states that their theory is that the family first settled in Pennsylvania and eventually became lured by the prospects of land and journeyed down the Great Pennsylvanian Wagon Road to the Valley of Virginia.  There are a few references that indicate that this might be true.  Our Ancestor Neil came to Pennsylvania for a while and married there,  one child was born there in 1766, and the rest of the children were born in North Carolina.  Over the many years this information was collected a lot of it came from personal knowledge of descendants contacted and the other from Bible's, Diaries, Old Letters and etc.  These two ladies are due all our thanks and respect for all the years of work and dedication, which made us all have a much easier job to collect and compile all this information.

I worked for seven long years hunting information on my Great Grandparents before I was lucky enough to get it all together, and then I just fell into it all at once, so I sort of understand how patient they had to be working for so many years and having to do the most of it by regular mail.

After getting on the Internet I did find them and lots of others also. I am still just as excited as ever when I find something or someone I have been looking for. It is really interesting and I am thoroughly addicted to it.

Sue Brawley Hayes