Dear Cousins, I am very happy to report that we have gained a number of new members to the list, and wish to welcome them. I wish I was functioning better in the midst of this surge of interest in our American Crossroads project. My Internet Service Provider is trying to get its act together, but still hasn't done it, and in the interim, the alternative means I've tried seem to merely fight with one another's software, and I'm still left with no adequate access to my e-mail and the sites I need to reach in order to upload and download files for the AMXROADS website. So, I'm temporarily back at my old server, and hope I can communicate a few basics. I'd like to re-state some of our focus and goals. It is my belief, based on my own 30+ years of self-taught struggle to track my ancestors, that computer usage, ability to e-mail, and search the internet have advanced genealogical success in just three or four years to a state that took me far in excess of twenty years to achieve in my "old" research. That's the good news! The bad news is that while this was happening the people using the technology were not advancing genealogically as quickly as they were adapting to the new toys. This was not their fault, because software producers, other technology-oriented companies, and the online companies were mainly interested in finding new ways to exploit the surge of genealogy users, and make money off them. But people can rarely self-diagnose what is wrong with them, let alone cure or excise their own infections. AMERICAN CROSSROADS was created in the hope that we could explore new ways to utilize the new technologies. I believe I've evolved some very good ways through my own trial and error. Lots of trials and lots of errors! "Lost" ancestors can be found so much more easily and quickly now, using the new technology. But the genealogical ground rules remain solidly in place. New methodologies must be found that are in keeping with the old ethical standards of proper documentation, respect for the copyrights and work of others, and above all, an ability to share and compare, and change what is wrong, if need be. Even in the 15 months since I started American Crossroads, I've learned a lot. I've learned that it is not SURNAME that matters, but IDENTITY. Surnames are often misidentifications, originally created through poor spelling and pronunciation of names usually written by others, then compounded in subsequent transcriptions over a couple of hundred years. Sometimes the misidentificatiion occurs strictly through modern transcriptions and indexing. Sometimes misidentification occurs because we rely on the work of others instead of investigating the documents ourselves. It is often when the results become incredibly tangled and error ridden that we try to untangle them only to find that we finally have to go back to the beginning -- and begin with original data. That is where I am with American Crossroads. It's the "Little Red Hen" school of discovery! As I started trying to straighten out the misidentifications and find the roots of my own Pennington family I discovered not all the "old" techniques worked, and I found the reason they didn't work was because my families (almost all of the lineages) kept moving. They were on the edge of the world wherever I found them. Over twenty-something years I had identified some characteristics in my wandering Watts family that were strangely repeated in my other families. Then I identified things in my McDaniel family that were strangely like the Watts and Penningtons. At each juncture the light bulb came on, shone brightly and was turned off by my mind set that the Watts and Penningtons and McDaniels (and their allied families) were all very separate entities, came from different locales and beginnings and had nothing to do with one another. AND my Smiths! I had given up on them! To my very great surprise I discovered patterns of movement in all my own early families that indicated however unique and disconnected from one another I thought they were, almost all moved out of a sphere of influence around Philadelphia, moved south and west, into Virginia, moved down the Shenandoah Valley, moved into North and South Carolina and then began spreading further south, and always, further west. In each case, some remnants stayed in the Philadelphia sphere, and some moved onward. Some stayed in northern Maryland, some moved on. Some holed up in the hills of northern Virginia (now West Virginia) and SW Pennsylvania; some rode on. And on and on from the 17th century until here we are -- their heirs. The Little Red Hen's equation is: HISTORY + LOCATION + KINSHIP = IDENTITY Take a fact -- any fact! Work out the inferences of the fact. What was happening in that location at the time of the fact? Who else was living there with the names you seek? Who else was living there that you recognize as surnames connected with your family in their previous locations? KINSHIP is not always relationship. Sometimes it comes from the locality, the mere fact of being neighbors; sometimes it comes from being part of the same religious group. The Quakers are the best example I know of kinship continued over many many generations. Sometimes kinship comes from a marriage so far back in time nobody remembers what the original connection was. The woman's name has been lost in the documents. But those families continued to move together across time and the expanding face of America, as my Watts, Markham, Smith and Van Winkle families did for at least 200 years. These people are difficult to trace because they were the founders of a totally new, unique culture, and when they moved their names were written differently. They were the "Backcountry," or Frontierspeople, or Pioneers. Sometimes it's hard to think of people who lived 20 miles from Philadelphia as living on the Frontier, or being Pioneers, but that's what they were. They were a blend of many countries, many cultures, many ethnicities. They became one, and that's what we are, even though it's hard to see it sometimes. That's what we hope to re-discover and re-establish with our research, with our website, and with this discussion list. American Crossroads! We meet here and re-connect with one another through our common ancestry, our common heritage, our common history, and our common kinship. Welcome! Let me know how I can help with in our common quest. Write the list. Many cousins are better than one! Love, Your Cousin, Carolyn Carolyn McDaniel cmacdee@teleport.com ========================================= --- Visit American Crossroads --- http://freepages.history.rootsweb.com/~amxroads