In the beginning...

I suppose we all have to start somewhere, so here I am with my very first blog post. I've stolen my husband's old Army moniker because it perfectly describes what I hope to accomplish with this blog, except I will not be peering into the future so much as the past. I'm sort of a backward-looking SoothSayre. I want to share the stories of my ancestors, mostly obscure yeoman farmers with little formal education who, nonetheless, helped build this great nation of ours. Fortunes and heirlooms and beautiful family portraits do not get handed down in our family, so stories and word pictures of these forebears will have to suffice. It is important to remember our roots to know how we came to be the people that we are. But it is even more important to honor our ancestors--all of them--and what better way to do that than to tell their life stories as best we can learn them.

One of my genealogy colleagues, Amy Johnson Crow, challenged our community to document the lives of 52 ancestors within a year through a weekly blog entry. I'm a little late to the challenge, but it seems like a fabulous idea so I'm taking up the gauntlet.

As I flew home to Virginia last week, I snapped a photo out the window of the Potomac River as it wanders south, and I contemplated the land that my ancestors found waiting for them here in the 1600s and 1700s. They could not have imagined in their wildest dreams the 3,000-mile weekend commutes I make, the traffic congestion of superhighways, or the population and development of the Old Dominion that they came to settle. Yet were it not for every single one of those brave souls who journeyed on rickety ships to reach Virginia's shores, I would not be here. Thank you, grandmothers and grandfathers. And were it not for those fine teachers of mine who cultivated an interest in history and genealogy (thanks, Mr. Chuck Smith and Mrs. Novice Kirkpatrick, among others!), I would not have known of my colonial Virginia heritage when I moved here seven years ago.