Putnam County seems to be the site of the roadblock that has prevented all members of my particular branch of the Wixon/Wixom, etc., family from delving back further in time. It appears, from a family Bible, that my great-grandfather, Ward Wixon, was born in Putnam Valley in Dec., 1830, and the only documentation we've found as to his existence in the county at all is a listing in the 1850 census, in which he's listed as living with the James Barger family. And that's all we can document until, ten years later, he married my great-grandmother in Illinois. (If we knew more, perhaps we could connect our line with the other Wixon lines that are better known...) The fact that Ward was living with the Bargers fits in with family oral tradition which state that he was orphaned young and apprenticed to a shoemaker. But the stories -- and I cannot prove any of them -- make no mention of the names of either of Ward's parents. (One story says that he had a sister, who may have been named Sarah or Caroline; and another says that at a time when Ward was old (I suppose that could have been any time between 1885 and his death in 1920) he got a copy of a New York newspaper and, reading an obituary, supposedly said "That was my sister" -- after which he crumpled up the paper and threw it into the fire...). The only other story we have says that Ward's father died in some accident involving horses, and that his mother tried to keep the family together, until she died... It appears that something happened to embitter Ward to whatever relatives he left behind in New York, and he would never talk about his family. And so no one realized that his family was not known until after he had died...A lesson for us all, I suppose. Well, if any of this rings any bells for anyone, I'd be grateful for suggestions. Dave Wixon, of Minnesota.