Welcome to this collection of web pages with genealogical information about my grandparents and my wife's grandparents, their forebears, and some of those forebears' other descendants. Unfortunately, there is very little family lore reflected here. Almost all of what is presented comes from records found in libraries and state and national records offices. Nevertheless, should you find a connection, I trust you will find the information on these pages helpful.
This website is a work in progress. It was begun about 2004, and I’ve added pages in fits and starts since then. In 2019, after a gap of close to 10 years, I added many new pages on individuals that were not on the site before and changed the navigation options. Only in 2022 did I begin to release pages relecting findings from research into my wife's forebears. I hope you’ll be able to find your way around the site and perhaps find someone of interest to you. If you do find someone of interest, please contact me (see below).
The easiest place to start may be the alphabetical list of biographies or the index of names, but the pedigree charts for our Stuart, Kelly, Higgins, Brown, Sammis, Wenger, and Fritsch grandparents may be of use. Happy hunting!
A note about spelling of surnames:
Two family surnames, Stuart and Kelly, pose particular challenges. Both are extremely common, and both have spelling variations that can make searches difficult even though the differences mean little or nothing. The spelling of the surname of my Stuart forbears appears to have been largely determined by the preferences of the church or government registrar. In the early 19th century, the surname of children of the same parents might have recorded at birth as Stuart in Renfrewshire but Stewart in Dunbartonshire. I recall having seen a registration that spelled my ancestor’s surname in two different ways on the same record and also noted that he lived on Steuart Street (a third spelling). My great-great-grandfather seems to have become insistent about the spelling of his surname as S-T-U-A-R-T towards the end of the 19th century, but his siblings were less demanding and there are descendants of his father whose names even in the 20th century are consistently spelled S-T-E-W-A-R-T. In these pages, I have tried to use the name assigned by the registrar at birth if there was a birth registration and have intermixed the various spellings in the alphabetical listing. The distinction between Stewart and Stuart is completely meaningless as far as I can determine. I’m even more confident of that lack of meaning when I look at spellings of the surnames of my Kelly forebears.
A note about web resources:
How to contact me:
The best way to contact me is through email using the address in the graphic at the top of this page. You can increase the chances that I will see and read your email by placing the word genealogy in all caps at the start of your subject line. I will do my best to respond to your inquiry.