I am an aging Caucasian male, happily retired, happily married, with lots of children, stepchildren, grandchildren and even some great-grandchildren, not to mention siblings, nieces, nephews, and their children.  I live amidst wonderful landscapes, surrounded by much sparsely populated land and wildlife.  I’ve traveled a lot, seeing much of the world, grasp every opportunity to visit new places, but also like returning to favourite places.  I am interested in many, many things.  I lead an active mental life.

But, I am also just the physical manifestation of a unique combination of genes drawn from many ancestors, some of whom I knew, but about most I know either very little or nothing at all.  I find myself at a single node in an ever expanding, sprawling genealogical network, a family tree.  My ego might shout that the tree begins with me – that the world did not exist before I arrived in it.  But I know otherwise and have the ancestors to prove it.

Generation by generation time deposits successive layers of memory; the lower levels – their occupants and events, their wrinkles and finest details – are smoothed and compressed, buried deeper and deeper, eventually disappearing into the depths of the past, lost to all, even the most diligent miner.  Partly, this is a consequence of the difficulty in finding relevant materials.  By creating this blog and populating it with stories, photographs, lists of memorabilia, and other related materials which have come to me, I hope to leave at least a partial record for those future family members who are curious about from whence they came.

Explore these pages, read about and see photographs of some of my (and possibly your) ancestors, and also see and read about family members who were current when I began this blog.

Derek Chambers
Eagleridge
January 31, 2013