Oh, Shenandoah, I'm bound to leave you.

On Monday we headed west across the Shenandoah River and then south through the Blue Ridge Mountains into Tennessee….the same route my colonial ancestors traveled on their way to homesteads in Missouri and Illinois.

One of my missions on this trip was to deliver all of my genealogy files to my sister, who now lives a few blocks from the Leesburg genealogy library. I haven’t done anything with them for years and I hope she will take it up. I’m also hoping her daughter, my niece Aralena, might assume the role of family historian in the next generation.

Our mother’s line has been thoroughly researched by my Aunt Lois, now in her 80's and living in Zion, Illinois. Because the McIntosh family emigrated from England, Scotland and Ireland in the mid 1800’s to Toronto and then to Illinois in the 1920’s, the blood line trail was fairly clear. In Europe she also found it easy to obtain church records for births, deaths and marriages and traced our ancestral past for the previous century.

Our father’s ancestors, on the other hand, came to America in the early 1600s, and my great aunt and second cousin, Glodean --who devoted decades to their research -- had to rely on census documents, war records, family bibles, etc. to uncover their roots.

Kate and I spent a couple of hours going through my files and noted that our gr.gr.gr.gr.gr. grandfather, Walter G. Warthen, mustered into the Virginia Militia at Fort Powhatan, VA, and married his wife, Lucy Rea, in Henry County, VA…in the very same state where we were transferring these family documents. After the Civil War, Walter and Lucy left Virginia and moved to Dickson County, Tennessee, and then to Posey County, Indiana. From there the Warthens moved to Illinois, where our father was born, and where he met and married our mother, Lila McIntosh.

My cousin Glodean has generously shared her wealth of research. Years ago she sent me the documentation I would need to gain membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, Daughters of 1812, and the Colonial Dames. I told Kate it would be easy to complete the links we need to Glo's memberships. However, the society I would REALLY like to apply to is the Flagon and Trencher, for descendants of colonial tavern keepers, or “grog shops”. Glo says we have a few of those in our family tree. Go figure!