An American Genealogy is a forum for detailing and discussing issues and approaches to gathering family histories, as well as documenting my journey and challenges to climbing my family tree. The name comes from my inspiration for documenting my family tree, our son Michael who has a uniquely American genealogy. Nearly every major event in American history is reflected in his family history, including every military conflict from King Philip’s War in 1675 through World War II, as well as events like the landing of the Mayflower, the founding of Harvard (as well as about a dozen towns and cities), slavery, westward expansion, Jim Crow, the Great Northern Migration, and the browning of America.

Using Michael as our inspiration we started putting together our family history, and this space is intended to share my journey in that process. We look forward to sharing what we’ve learned going from a simple family tree, to a deeply researched, well documented family history going back dozens of generations, giving guidance to get over some of the humps we encountered, and hopefully learning from those who take the time to share what they’ve learned.

About the author

The authors are a middle-aged, suburban guy who is putting together his family’s history, and now blogging, in his spare time, and his wife who’s new to this hobby. He’s always had a fascination with history, and the family history when he was growing up was a rich tradition of famous men that was freely spoken of by everyone older than himself. The wife’s tradition is the exact opposite, and so when we decided to start working on this we began with not only trying to discover her side first, we also began learning about the unique nature of African American genealogy. To date we have about 3500 legitimately identified relatives in our tree.