Back in what sometimes seems like the Dark Ages, I started researching my family roots – it was the late 80’s and I had very little information except for some notes my mother had made. Though the internet DID exist at the time, it was nothing like the World Wide Web as we know it now and most researchers were still using snail mail and making trips to libraries and hsitoric societies to do their research. It was a slow process and patience was required. Even when I finally had a computer in the very late 80’s, there wasn’t much online yet – there were a few services like CompuServe and Prodigy that had a few genealogy areas, and AOL came along soon after with a larger genealogy base, but it was still pretty hard to find anything online at all.
By the mid 1990’s, we had the beginnings of the internet as we know it now and browsers were beginning to get more sophicated to the point that there were actualy search engines that could find sites. It would still be a few years before Google would arrive, but we did have Webcrawler and Lycos and a few others. In 1996, the USGenWeb Project got its start in Kentucky, with other states follwing along soon after. I jumped on board with the PA project and set up sites for Chester and Delaware counties, which I ran for the next six years.
This site is an outgrowth of some of the information that I had gathered for my Chester site when it was part of the PA group, but most of it has been accumulated in the years since leaving that project. My research into my own family lines is largely completed but I have gethered an enormous amount about other related lines in the process, much of which appears on this site.
The bulk of the data on this site resides in the Data Archives area, broken down into categories. The Search bar in the upper right corner will pull up any page on the site when searching to make it easy to find those elusive ancestors.
Site Bibliography
In an effort to allow researchers to delve further into their roots, I am including a listing, as an ongoing process, of the sources used in various places on this site.
Dunaway, Wayland Fuller. “The English Settlers in Colonial Pennsylvania”, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 52: 4, (Oct. 1928). Print.
McCracken, George E. “The Welcome Claimants: Penn’s Colony, Volume 2”, Bowie: Heritage Books, 1996.
Pomfret, John E., “The Proprietors of the Province of West New Jersey, 1674-1702”, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 75: 2, (Jan. 1951). Print.
Sheppard, Walter Lee, Jr. Passengers and Ships Prior to 1684: Penn’s Colony, Volume 1. Bowie: Heritage Books, 1992.
Shourds, Thomas. History and Genealogy of Fenwick’s Colony. Bridgeton, NJ: 1876