We hope not only that you will find the information in this site interesting but that you will also want to contribute to it. While the “ancient history” stuff comes from documents or archives we have had in the family for years, far more important are your memories of anyone, living or dead: your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents if you are fortunate enough to have met them, but also of yourself and your family. Memories add life and colour to our Family History.

But memories are funny things. As every good police officer knows, witnesses are notoriously unreliable. So for every witness to an event, there will be a different account of that event. Assembling a family history is much the same. The more people who contribute to it, the fuller it will be. Quite often, one person’s memory fragment sparks related memories in other family members, resulting in a cascading effect of memories throughout the family.

Accounts of the events in our own families differ depending on who is telling the story. The stories and histories presented here should always be read with this in mind. And if you have another perspective or additional information, we would love to hear of it. Please leave a comment on any story. Our intention here is to capture the richness of our family heritage and own family memories.

If you have a brief comment or reaction which you wish to add to an existing post — perhaps you remember something that is not covered in the post or remember it differently! — then you are invited to comment wherever a comment form exists. If your comment is a correction or an addition that can be incorporated into the post itself, the author (or editor) may do that with appropriate source credit, and remove your comment as no longer necessary. If it does not easily fit, then it will stay as a comment, perhaps generating discussion from other readers. Both scenarios are valuable. For more information on how we treat comments, please see our Usage Policy.

If you would like to share a memory, either first- or second-hand, either by contributing a new post or making a comment, please see the Sign Up page. If you are not registered with us, you can still use the Contact Us form to share your thoughts.

Protecting the Privacy of Living Persons

We are greatly concerned with the impact of telling stories about other people — but that is what this site is all about; we want to gather stories and anecdotes not just about people long dead, but about those who are still with us and whose exploits, achievements or, even, disasters maybe of great interest to generations to come.

We attempt to achieve a balance between providing an interesting and complete family history and protecting living family members from embarrassment or worse, identity theft, in two ways.

First, we have restricted access to some posts to a limited audience of Judd and Betty’s descendants. We have also restricted access to viewing comments on these posts, as many comments may well contain memories or stories that we may want to keep within the family so to speak.

Second, we request permission from affected family members before releasing any post that involves a living person. We want to protect your rights — if we find a story that mentions more than just your name, we will let you see and approve it before it gets released to a wider audience. We hope, of course, that you will give your permission but, if something is beyond what you can tolerate, we will understand and respect your wishes. Please be as circumspect with your comments.