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 and nephews, and their off-spring.  And I am just the physical manifestation of a unique combination of genes drawn from many ancestors, some of whom I knew, but about most of whom I know either very little or nothing at all.  I occupy 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.

I am going to use this blog to publish information about my ancestors.

Time deposits successive layers of memory, generation by generation; the lower levels, their occupants and events, become buried, deeper and deeper, eventually disappearing into the overburden of the past, lost to all but 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 a record for those future family members who are curious about from whence they came.

I do hope that you, the reader, will come back now and then.  If you get really fascinated, you can Follow this blog.  Whenever I add anything, you’ll be notified.

Derek Chambers
Eagleridge
January 31, 2013