Our family genealogy, or family history, splits in to two great divides. Even though we are complete strangers from most everyone who will visit this site, it's no suprise that our genealogy falls in to two groups: one for me and one for my spouse. Because we are one big happy family (that's internet humor) we put everything here in one place for convenience. But from an organization point of view, the family trees really do split down the middle

The path of Terry Weinberg (Anderson) takes one road, and that of Janet Wheeler Buchanan the other road. Terry's family hails from the likes of Poland, Russia, Germany and Sweden. It contains the surnames of Anderson, Schoepke, Gille, Martin, Manning, Looney, Kennett and others. Janet's comes from almost exclusively Scotland and England. Her heritage is rich with names of Buchanan, Wheeler, Gist, Boyce, Goode and Barzee.

With Schoepke from Poland, Anderson from Sweden, Martin and Manning homebound in the US one would think our two ancestral trees would be far, far apart given that Buchanan is from Scotland, Wheeler from England and other strains from all over Europe. One would think with this kind of ethnic and geographic diversity that we might have very distinct and separate family trees. But as luck would have it, Janet and I have ancestors that actually met in the mountains of West Virginia in the earliest days of the United States. Her ancestors explored and surveyed some of the earliest towns in the mountains and mine came in and settled the towns themselves. They most certainly had to have seen each other even if only in passing. Places like Rosby's Rock and Moundsville West Virginia were layed out by Janet's forebears and settled by mine. It is a very, very small world. The details of some of these meetins are in our family stories section.

An overriding question that faces a lot of busy people today is why do family history at all? The next section of our website attempts to provide an explanation that busy people can make sense of.

How is our collection of family history organized? Is it just a bunch of names on charts? If it was, it would be as boring as many of the collections of dusty old names you've already seen. SEE HOW OUR STORIES ARE ORGANIZED.