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MEMOIRS

narrative accounts of our family history

SURNAMES

  1. Austin
  2. Blereau
  3. Cawood
  4. Faul
  5. Fortner
  6. Hall
  7. Keller
  8. Lavergne
  9. Lebert
  10. Lyman
  11. McBride
  12. Nelson

see also: Families

LOCATIONS

USA

  1. Arkansas
  2. Florida
  3. Indiana
  4. Kansas
  5. Louisiana
  6. New Mexico
  7. New York
  8. "Ohio"
  9. Oklahoma
  10. South Dakota
  11. Texas
  12. Washington

CANADA

  1. Nova Scotia

ENGLAND

  1. Warwickshire
  2. Yorkshire

IRELAND

FRANCE

FEATURES

Lunar Phase Calculator

NEW ARTICLES

Genealogical research will turn up more than you expected as you will see in Who's Your Mama? Are You Catholic? And Can You Make a Roux? by Denise Hall

Life Long Resident of Gravette Passes Away -- the obituary for Joseph Shelton Austin (12 January 1858 - 20 July 1940)

Links to information about Doctor John Hall, the son-in-law of William Shakespeare

Note: These pages are a little out of date at this point. We have a few more current genealogical items that you should check out: our genealogy blog (also called The Hallmanac) and our family tree website. (DH, 12Sept2005)

D & D's Hallmanac -- A Family History

About D & D's Hallmanac

When I was eight or nine years old, I discovered some old papers in a drawer at my grandparents house. On these papers information concerning the names and dates of my ancestors were recorded. No tales of heroic battles or political intrigue -- just names and a few notes about marriages, births and deaths. The discovery of my family tree fascinated me. The idea that I descended from people who traced out a continuous line stretching into the remote past seemed a mysterious thing to my boyhood mind. Interest in my family's genealogy never escalated into a mania. I began to research this family history by asking for photocopies of whatever records might be in the possession of my relatives -- a meager collection of names and dates and a few yellowing newspaper clippings. A few years ago (1998), I did ask my grandparents to tell me what they could remember, but I quickly found that their memories, while good at recalling specifics, were not capable of putting together a story. The story I have had to piece together myself.

A family history is not identical to a family tree or genealogical listing of names and dates. Genealogy is important to establish relationships between people and to determine the dates and places associated with each of the characters that animate the history. Genealogy is the raw data, the skeleton upon which the flesh of family history grows.

The story that I would like to tell is bound together by many themes, such as pioneering -- the struggle with the land for subsistence, religious life -- the search for God, agrarian communitarianism -- living and working together with one's neighbors, stoicism, repression, fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, etc. Some themes like commitment to family are noble, others, such as moral repression and anti-intellectualism are born out of ignorance. The story operates on many levels and across many generations.

The contents of this website will provide much of the genealogical information that I find, but my focus is to animate the lives of the people whose names and dates are listed in the genealogical registry. The content you find here is complementary and supplementary to the books that I'm putting together on various family members or families.

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