Thank you for visiting this site, which contains information about my family who reside in western New York State. I began researching and documenting our family history back in 1997, in the early days of internet access. I had accumulated several boxes of family ephemera from my grandmother and great aunt and finally decided to start sorting through it. In these boxes were a wealth of family history documentation: photo albums, the old grand kind covered in beautiful fabrics or elaborately hand-tooled leather; scrap books, put together by teenage girls fom another generation; postcards, saved over the course of a lifetime; and all sorts of seemingly random clippings and documents. With help from relatives, a program called "Family Treemaker", and the internet I was able to piece together a clear picture of the lives of my grandparents and their grandparents. I also connected with, and shared information with, many other descendants from the ancestors I had traced, even meeting several of them who took the time to come visit Rochester.
I picked up my old genealogy notebook in the fall of 2008 while cleaning my office and have been hooked back in ever since. The developments in family history research since my early forages are impressive. I traded my old software (Version 5) in for the latest (Version 19) and dusted off my old boxes of info. I've reconnected with several other researchers who helped me years ago and we've been trading our findings. The wealth of archival information available through ancestry.com, rootsweb, familysearch.org, and various genforums have been invaluable to me.
I've created this site to share my information with the rest of my family, both immediate and extended; and also to share it with other descendants of these same families who are perhaps researching their own histories and can use some of the data collected here. I look forward to meeting more family members and will continue to add data and media to this site as I find it.
