About Us

What this Website Is NOT!

This Website is NOT an academic thesis and it is NOT an historical record. We are not historians or professional genealogists, and we don't offer any related services or products for sale within our pages. We do, however, participate in the Geocities Affiliates Program and, in keeping with that, we may provide links to related commercial Websites.    As for ourselves, we don't pretend to have any special knowledge or expertise in either history or genealogy.   And, if you are looking for primary sources here, you are in the wrong place. Each piece of information presented in these pages should be considered as reliable as the sources which are cited in the reference notes included with it.   If there are no reference or source notes connected with a subject, then that item should be considered unverified, tentative or unreliable for all intents and purposes. Historical essays written by our family members about our family should be considered "memoirs" or "traditions" and not necessarily factual histories. Neither I, nor any other contributor to this Website will be responsible for any type of damages, either direct or indirect, arising from the condition or use of our Website content. Having said that, we are making a conscientious effort to prepare the citations for all of our sources and these will be included in our pages as soon as possible.   This Website is constantly under revision, and the absence of a source citation is not necessarily an indication that one does not exist. The decision was made at the outset to publish the genealogy data during its collection phase and to add the sources in later.   This was done for a number of reasons, particularly in order to facilitate the assistance of family members who are scattered around the world in the Website design and data collection process. Anyone who has done even a small amount of genealogy research will appreciate what an expensive and time consuming task it can be.   Although documentation is our goal, we recognize the impediment to immediate fulfillment of that goal, and for the purposes of this Website, we rely mostly on Internet sources for data relating to individuals who died more than one hundred years ago.   Also, in some cases, even data for living individuals was obtained from Internet sources, if they belong to branches of our family with whom we are unacquainted.   Naturally, we encourage people to contact us with corrections if they find themselves represented erroneously in our pages. We believe that, with all its potential for inaccuracy, Internet information is only slightly less reliable than any other secondary source; such as census records, obituaries, even death certificates and ship passenger lists, which are generally prepared in haste and without any documentation whatsoever to validate the statements of the information providers. And yet, one caveat remains to be expressed: that which concerns the propagation and compounding of false information obtained from Internet sources by means of digital copies and downloads. The ease with which entire collections can be integrated with our own, without so much as a cursory review of records which are often later found to contain incongruities, has startled us in the past and given us pause. For this reason, we have adopted the practice of entering each record individually, regardless of the source from which it is derived. While this practice can create delays, we feel it is worth the extra time and trouble, just to have a reasonable measure of confidence in our data. Even so, because of the sources we use, we cannot guarantee the factual integrity of any information we collect from Internet or other "contributed" sources, such as Ancestral Files from the Church of Jesus Christ of The Latter Day Saints (LDS), and Family Tree Maker CDs. Nor can we promise that two separate entries for the same person will never be found in our files. Such duplication can arise from vital inconsistencies between multiple sources for a given individual. We will correct these errors in our own source file as soon as they are identified, although updates of our Web pages will only be made twice each year, scheduled for January and June of the year 2000. Moreover, the "corrections" we make, if no primary source is available, will be based upon our own best judgement as to reliability of each of the sources from which the conflicting entries originate. And, finally, we have no intention of violating any copyrights. And, with the exception of relatively short passages quoted from published works, we have obtained copyright permissions for everything we use on this site that is not in the public domain or that was not authored by us. Pedigrees on our pages, while they may resemble those on other websites, have been cross-checked and modified by several sources before being published in our own format. If you feel that anything on this website stands in violation of a copyright that you own, please contact us.

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