Abraham Lincoln - First Inaugural Address

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Abraham Lincoln's thoughts are just as important today as they were in 1861. Even the simple act of one manager declining another's edit can become the basis of anger and hostility, contrary to the better angels of our nature.

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"I hope that by documenting memorials of other people's relatives, I am helping them grow their trees..." From another memorial manager.

Ensuring the accuracy of the information on Find A Grave is a team effort. To be successful we all should work together and should deal with edits to our memorials in a way that minimizes the efforts of those who submit edits to memorials. I understand and appreciate the effort that managers expend to research and submit edits to memorials. I will make every effort to verify edits to my memorials. If I am unable to verify them, I will contact the submitter and ask for documentation. I will not summarily decline edits with a request that the submitter resubmit the edits with documentation.

When my mother died in 1996, my sister and I sorted through her papers and found a great deal of information she had collected on her family. Included in that information were a number of typed notated family trees and a book, A Historical Account of the Trago/Trego Family by June (Schaull) Lutz published in 1983 to which she had supplied information which documented our connection to the earliest known Trego born in 1655 in the Maryland Colony.

About the same time I learned of the research one of my father's first cousins, Jerry Ray Kennedy, was compiling on my father's family who had settled in Weakley County, Tennessee about twenty years before the start of the Civil War. He documented his research and distributed printed copies of his family research, one for each family, to many of us.

My additions to Find A Grave are from all the branches of family research I have done so the information in the memorials are from my family research as well as others who have searched records for me in various locations. I also add information based on requests from others.

As I wrote above, I am more than happy to accept edits to these memorials, but I will ask for documentation for many of them because of the accumulated research that I and others in my family have done. I will not add any death locations based only on the Social Security Death Index because the last residence or the last benefit location is not always the death location.

I am also happy to provide copies of my family research to anyone interested in the family. I can generate files that include the burial information. Please send me a request at my email address.