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Hi everyone,

Here's our blog for family photos and interesting history tidbits I uncover in my genealogy ramblings. It'll take some time but hopefully the photos will go up first so everyone can view at their leisure. Send me any interesting bits and pieces you may know of to add to the blog. Enjoy!
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California Pioneers: Sullivan, Scherrebeck and Murphy

*disclaimer: see bottom of post* Brick walls are stumbling block of every family historian. Perseverance is key. Over time you chip away painstakingly compiling notes, facts, tidbits of seemingly unconnected information until one day...the wall cracks wide open. This happened recently with my research on my paternal lines. Many years ago my grandmother Freda showed us the old Pollard Family Bible. On the inside cover was a treasure trove of hand-written details: names and key dates for three generations. Somehow I had the prescience of mind to grab a notebook and transcribe every bit. This was the launching pad for my research  many years later with the advent of the internet. Here are my paternal great-grandparents: Albert Walter Pollard, Anne Monahan and their son (my grandfather) Albert Cyril Pollard. Picture probably taken c. 1910s. Think the family bible Grandma Fritz (Freda's nickname) showed me was given to Anna Monahan-Pollard by her family priest (Ross Parish,...
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Day with the Dead at Stent

So...what does your family like to do on the weekends? Well . . . we like to visit very old dead people we don't even know. Seeing that we're now living in an area just chock-a-block full of history - most of it now long forgotten - we've decided to spend more time this year exploring our own historical backyard. Today's outing: The small Stent Cemetery near Jamestown, California. Aaron's maternal grandmother, Nettie Jones Perkins supposedly was born in this very town when it was actually a thriving mining town. By the advent of her birth in 1900 it was in decline, as were many small towns in the region once mines became depleted. By 1925 the post office was decommissioned and shut up for good. Today, all that's left is this very small, hardly noticeable cemetery. Blink and you'll miss it. Only a handful of tombstones remain with many forgotten graves, now unmarked. Some are beautiful while other are mere rustic slabs of granite; no name, no det...
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Colonial Roots: Fordyce

Fordyce line Welcome to the Fordyce line brick wall: Abraham Fordyce (1753-1810).  The American branch of the Fordyce (or Fordice) family is a twisted, messy and confusing one. Several pockets of Fordyces found in colonial history in various areas: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Nova Scotia and especially in New Jersey and the Pennsylvanian frontier. Not surprisingly we see them as Patriots and loyalists during the Revolutionary War. There's numerous James and Johns and Henrys for generations obscuring the search.  There are at least two Abrahams overlapping that are particularly difficult to tease apart from each other.  Many stories exist and sadly out right Geneaological Fraud thanks to the infamous and unscrupulous Gustave Anjou. He was was hired (probably by someone in the Samuel W. Fordyce of Arkansas branch) to trace the family line back to its roots in Scotland. Except he totally fabricated or cut&paste his Fordyce research, so much of wha...
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