The mantle of family historian has fallen to me from my father and my sister, now both with the Lord. My husband first started researching our family histories when we inherited all the handwritten family genealogy records some years after my sister's death. Then we dug out an old handwritten ledger that my father had compiled before his death. That piqued my husband's interest, so he began looking into his own family history, talking with older family members, recording their stories, searching for long-lost relatives and finding family history along the Oregon Trail. And experimenting with genealogy software. All that led to a family reunion of cousins who had not been together in 50 years, and sharing of old family photos. That's when I got involved – somebody had to manage those photos and get names and dates recorded. And those photos needed to be shared by all the family! My obsessive-compulsive nature could not let a bunch of old photos lie around in shoe boxes and brown envelopes until we all died and no one knew who was in the photos. The old photos led to searches for family members, which led ultimately to Findagrave, and here we are!

My roots are in Texas with my Walker/Hammonds/Wells/Mason/Thomas/Standard/Vaculik lineage. That has led me to the Pettys and the Bates and the Starlings and the Goffs and the Pattons and the Jonases and the Fojtiks who are all a part of that. As our own family has expanded, we have taken up the Waters/Humphries/McKinney/Richey search and we keep going. My primary interest is still in old family photos, and preserving those, along with their stories and personalities for our family to come. So if I come knocking on your door, be prepared to spread the old photos out and talk to me about them!

My husband continues to collect family information on the Ashford/Jarvis/Sullivan/Hooker/Buckle/Jones/Stillwell families in Oregon and Washington. He also maintains our family history database and scouts out websites for genealogy research. Fortunately for him, his ancestors were wise enough to leave the eastern and mid-western states and move west rather than get involved on the wrong side of the War of Northern Aggression! We are frantically trying to preserve some Ashford family history that has been collected in the past, but is in danger of being lost now as family historians die off and no one is there to pick up the mantle. The challenge for us is that we are far away from those sources. Fortunately, we have inherited quite a lot of old family photos which we are preserving and trying to put names with.

I have posted a lot of old family photos on FAG. If you want to use those photos I would ask that you please let me know, that you give me credit for the photos, and that you please use them accurately and responsibly. It's a real shock to see my photos on another website with incorrect information listed.