Origins

I never thought about where I came from while I was growing up. I lived in a cozy microcosm, unconcerned with why I happen to be born in Kokomo, Indiana, or how my parents got there, or where they might have come from.

My world had little definition. We were on the East Coast for a while during World War II, and I remember taking rides in our 1936 Ford, but I was too young to know our whereabouts or the why of things. I looked out the car window at the passing scenery and accepted it with the ignorance and innocence of youth.

I have difficulty distinguishing between things I remember and remembering things I was told. Do I remember the 1936 Ford or do I remember being told about it? For a while my world was a street in Kokomo, but that eventually expanded to encompass towns to the south, family reunions, graveyards on Memorial Days, and a ghost town in Kentucky. I met people and heard stories of others who I‘d never met - people I discovered to be relatives - relatives with surnames different from my own - Frank, Jacobs, Manlove, and Muir. How could they all be related to me? The jumble of names, places, and stories made no sense - fit no pattern.

I was born in 1939 and things were very different from what they have become. The United States counted 132 million people - half of today’s population. Transportation was not so dynamic as now - radio was popular, but there was no television. Computers and the Internet were inconceivable. Many of the families in the Midwest had been there for generations, and some of mine were among the original settlers.

Most of my ancestors came into the Kentucky-Indiana-Ohio region in the early 1800’s - some before that. They came over roads no wider than narrow paths through a wilderness of old growth forest with trees reaching five to six feet in diameter.

Natives, “Indians”, as the European settlers mistakenly called them, were hostile. A book by Alan Eckert does a great job of describing those early days. The Friontiersman is a well documented chronicle depicting the adventures of Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone, and other early settlers into Kentucky. Eckert tells of the Shawnees who lived north of the Ohio River, of their hunting grounds in Kentucky, and the resulting conflict between them and the encroaching settlers.

I got interested in genealogy later in life. By then many people I would liked to have talked to were long dead. My research added more names to my ancestry list. Five generations back and a person can count sixteen Great-Great-Grandparents - sixteen surnames. I know fourteen of them. The number of ancestral names doubles with each succeeding generation - from 16 to 32, 64, 128... etc. There are over two thousand surnames possible in the twelfth generation. That reaches back in time to when the Pilgrims stepped into America by way of Plymouth Rock. I have traced a few back to colonial times, but am not yet able to brag about any being on the Mayflower.

But my interest is not in discovering Mayflower relatives or famous ancestors. It is in putting a personal face on history; on fitting those historical events and trends I studied in school into my own family history. My quest is to follow the threads of those disparate people, ancestors of mine, as they wove the fabric of my background. I hope to retrace the random paths they traveled which eventually converged to produce me.