the eight directions
The eight families
Everyone in this wing descends from eight great-grandparent lines. Each family has a room: the story, the people worth meeting, the records that anchor it, and — because honesty is the house style — what is proven and what is still open. Back to The Family.
The Temples
Bishopstrow, Wiltshire → Bristol → tidewater Virginia → Texarkana & the piney woods
A dissenting Wiltshire manor, a posthumous son, and a name carried three hundred years.
The Crouches
Southwestern Pennsylvania → Wise County, Texas → Arkansas → Texarkana
A branch with a hard floor — a Pennsylvania farmer born about 1800 whose own parents are unknown, and a Maryland pedigree above him that a court's own arithmetic refuses.
The Bonds
Baltimore County → the Methodist circuits → Missouri → Little Rock
A circuit rider whose parents are still unknown, a Gettysburg doctor who ended in a copper camp, and a grandmother who was not the mother.
The Plunketts
Killummod, Roscommon → Saint-Domingue → Williamsburg → Des Arc, Arkansas
Roscommon to a sugar island to the Grand Prairie — the most thoroughly researched story in the family and the least likely.
The Catchingses
Wilkes County, Georgia → Crow Creek, Tennessee → Travis County, Texas → Taft, in South Texas
The oldest American claim in the family, and a documented line from Georgia bounty land to farms outside Austin.
The Johnsons
Lanchester, County Durham → Liverpool → Austin
The coal county, the port city, and the church nobody thought to look in.
The Wests
Plymouth Colony → Rhode Island → upstate New York → Bleeding Kansas → the Texas oil fields
The one New England line — Plymouth to Rhode Island to Bleeding Kansas to the Texas oil fields.
The Carpenters
Hallau, Schaffhausen → the Shenandoah → Carpenter's Station, Kentucky → Missouri → Texas
A Swiss family that translated its own name, and a widow of twenty-two who outlived two husbands by forty-two years.
These eight rooms are my side of the children's tree. Their mother's people — the Woodall–Ramsay side — have a wing of their own.