We Are All Related

The Move As I alluded to in an earlier post  (end of 2nd paragraph), my family moved from the Washington DC suburbs to West Virginia. We moved at the end of 1977, but my father had bought a cabin on an acre of property on a mountain in 1974. As I am prone to remember, we bought the property on August 17, 1974 and moved on December 23, 1977, which was a tough time to move. When we bought the property, the whole family traveled to the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. My father had found out about the new subdivision on the mountain from an ad in the Washington Star. They had also found a similar plan in nearby Shenandoah County, VA. My mother had called and gotten all of the information on both of those subdivisions and we went to one three weeks earlier in Virginia and then we went to the one in West Virginia, Glenwood Forest. We took a tour with a guy named Stan Patty. He had bought a lot a year or two earlier. He was a genial man, balding with black hair, a bushy mustache and bl

We're Not Related To Those Davenports Oh yes you are. One big thing I have found from searching for people in my "Super Tree" is if people in a certain region share a surname, they are related. I used to think, well maybe there were 2 different Johannson families that settled into Rockingham County, VA and they are not related to each other. But from my long hours of experience I am finding that people with those same last names are most definitely related. The exceptions to this rule are surnames like Smith, Jones, Jefferson, Freeman, Washington, Williams, Johnson, etc. Most people can tell you who their grandparents are and maybe, just maybe they can name their great grandparents. People descended from your great grandparents give you your 2nd cousins. You may know a few of them from your family reunions. But most people do not know who their 3rd and 4th cousins are. Populations grow exponentially - that is there are many, many more people at the next generation

What Are The Odds? My step-son Luke was moving to a new mobile home out in the country (about 6-7 miles from downtown) and he found out that he needed to have a front and back deck installed with steps on both. He also found out that the decks had to be inspected by the city health inspectors even though the mobile home was in the county and not in the city. There was a rule that said if you lived with a 3 mile radius of the city, then the decks had to be inspected. I helped Luke build the decks, along with several family members. Now I am not anything like a carpenter - I am just good dumb labor. I spent most of my time just overseeing the construction and every now and then swinging a few hammers. Luke's girlfriend had a best friend's husband who was the brains behind the operation. Stephen was about 28 years old and he was an electrician for a firm in town. He was not a carpenter, but he knew enough to be dangerous - which was about 100 times more than any of the re

If you didn't know this - we are ultimately all related to each other. At least this is what I think from my Judeo-Christian point of view. I have ended up creating what I term as an Ancestry.com "Super Tree," where I have tried to connect everyone that I know to my tree. I know this is not what Ancestry.com envisioned, but this is what my tree has become. I want to tell my story on how this "Super Tree" came to be. Adopted My name is Frederick Todd Beach. I was born in Washington, DC in 1966. I was brought to who I call Mom and Dad 7 days after birth. My mother told me I was adopted when I was 4 or 5 years old. It was a big event in my life, but I accepted it as fact. I think I asked her, "Are yous serious?" My older brother told Mom he wished he was adopted too. I later had a sister born about 3 years after me. This is often the case that people have natural-born children after they adopt. I grew up in the Maryland suburbs until I was 11 when we