MacPhersonIndex

 

MC PHERSON FAMILY GENEALOGY

 


 Hello, and welcome to my site. I'm Bertrand K. Macpherson. I started with my genealogy in 1964, but then laid it aside after my wife and I started raising a family. Luckily, I had made a few inroads, so when I picked it up again 31 years later, it wasn't a complete mystery. I started with an old typewritten and mimeographed manuscript prepared by my great-uncle, Melville L. (Uncle Lafe) McPherson (below), who penned his family memoirs over a 3-year stretch, 1934-37. Unfortunately, research has since showed that he was only about half right with his data. Nonetheless, it was a start, more than most people get.

 

 My Uncle Lafe took care of the McPherson line back to my great-great-grandfather in Loudoun County, VA. Lafe was a uneducated farmer who never finished the third grade, but he had a lot of common sense. He bought and sold some 30 farms in Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Despite a midlife bout with crippling arthritis, he recovered, went into the restaurant business in Kansas City. Uncle Lafe gave me the start to find 2 generations further back to the immigrant, Daniel McPherson, who came to the colony of Delaware about 1697. I owe my interest in genealogy research and the following stories to him

 

     The other half of my parental line is KNICKERBOCKER as my father, David Macpherson, married Beryl Knickerbocker on Sept. 23, 1930, in Dallas, TX.

      Knickerbocker is a storied name in America. One thinks of all the place names called Knickerbocker. Yet all of those were named for the family, started on a whim, perhaps, by a Dutch immigrant named Harmon Janssen van Wye in Dutchess County, New York. Knickerbocker is the Anglicized spelling of the Dutch word for "marbles." But rather than detail my family's history, I decided to publish a few stories about my ancestors, the more interesting ones, from my point of view.

      I start with my own father, David Franklin Macpherson, who was born on Jan. 19, 1902, in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. His father had made one of the dashes for land in Indian Territory, staking a claim in Kay County. But by the time Dad was born, his father had proved his claim was mostly sand and dust. So the family was forced to move to the town of Tonkawa.

     Dad was the youngest of six children, five of whom grew to adulthood. He inherited a set of vocal chords from his mother's German roots (Sandfort) that served him well until the Great Depression. He gave up his singing career to raise a family after marriage to Beryl. During his career as a singer-choir leader, Dad decided to change the spelling of his surname. His reason? There was a popular evangelist touring the country in the 1930's & 1940's. He didn't want to be linked to her, so he changed his name from McPherson to Macpherson. His brother, Eugene, changed his to MacPherson. All spellings of McPherson are related, however. I pay tribute to him with my first story. I hope you like it, and the others to follow.

          Please click on the links below to view the Story Index. I also have the               McPherson Lineage and the Knickerbocker Lineage in text form. I recently added my entire .GED to this site. I hope you enjoy the stories.

                                                                                                                         Thank You

  View McPherson Lineage    View Story Index    View Knickerbocker Lineage

  McPherson Family.GED Report

Bertrand Macpherson

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U.S. Copyright and Genealogy 2003 by Bertrand K. Macpherson. All rights reserved. The pages of this site may be freely linked to. Facts and ideas from this site may be freely used to assist you but are not to be copied in whole... Thank-You.