the research moves
The tree behind this wing is a working research project, not an archive — it changes as records get read. This page notes what changed and when. The current published snapshot is 10 September 2026: 2,339 people, 399 sources. For what the proof marks on a parent mean, see how good is a link. Back to The Family.
The 1850 census settled a question this tree had answered wrongly for years. Washington Rose's wife was Sarah, alive that October at 50, so the 1843 death is gone. The 11 July 1816 Putnam County marriage the tree carried belongs to a different bride, Elizabeth McGehee, so the couple's marriage now reads simply before 1830. A son, William, born about 1841, joins the family from that same census page.
Both of these questions had sat open for the same reason, and it was not a shortage of records. A census asks how each person in a house is related to the head of it. So when a child is written down as the head's daughter, that names her father and says nothing whatever about the woman standing next to him. The mother was left resting on who happened to be in the room, which is not proof of anything. The answer was already in the same two censuses, a line or two up. The 1900 census asks two questions of the parents that it never asks of a child: how long the marriage has lasted, and — of married women only — how many children she has borne and how many are still living. Lila Plunkett's line says twenty years married, four children borne, four living — and there are exactly four children in that house, Alice among them. Four borne, four living, four present: the household is the whole of her family, so Alice is hers. Her parents were named together again in a Little Rock paper the morning after her 1914 wedding. William Benedict Crouch's case turns on the other column. His parents' line says forty-seven years married, which puts the wedding in 1853, three years before he was born, and the marriage ran on unbroken from there. There was no other wife for him to have belonged to. Neither answer is written on the child's own line in the census. Both are on a parent's, a few rows away in the same house — and that is the entire reason these two sat unanswered as long as they did. There are more of them to go back for. Worth being plain about what this is: no record here says outright, in words, who either mother was. The case is built from two records that only make sense together. That is why the mark on these two now reads proven by argument rather than proven on a record, and why the note underneath each one ends by naming what would undo it — for both, a marriage record showing the father married earlier than we think.
A fortnight ago the mark beside a parent said one of two things: proven, or nothing at all. The research had a six-way vocabulary for how well a link is proved; the mark did not, so it flattened all of it. That gap was not harmless. Thirteen parents were carrying a check mark reading proven while the research note lower down the same page said the question had been looked at and what is in hand settles nothing — the page contradicted itself, and nothing here could see it, because the contradiction never moved the underlying flag. Three more had been examined and deliberately declined, and showed no mark at all, which made a decision look identical to an unopened question. The mark now carries the distinction: proven on a record, proven by argument, proven before this vocabulary existed and not yet re-read under it, asserted and under review, or declined. Each one links to a new page that says what it means, and a check that runs before anything is published now refuses to ship a page whose mark and whose note disagree.
This wing is rebuilt from the master tree after every research pass — and for twelve days it was not. The tree moved and the published copy did not, so anyone reading here in late August was seeing August's conclusions while the work had gone on without them. The gap is closed: every page is now built from the 5 September tree, and twenty-eight parentage conclusions that had already been earned are finally visible. The interesting part is why nothing caught it. The checks that run before publishing compared the number of proven links on each side, and that number had not changed — the research had been rewriting the reasoning behind links already marked proven, which is invisible to a count. A check that compares the notes themselves now runs before anything ships.
The notes on a person's page are kept here verbatim, and many of them now open with a line naming what kind of proof stands behind that parent. Direct means a record read for this project states the relationship outright. Argument means no single record states it, but two or more independent records, set against each other in writing with the conflicts dealt with, leave no room for another answer. Informant means one uncorroborated statement by somebody who need not have been there. Underdetermined means the question has been looked at, what is in hand reaches neither bar, and the note names the cheapest document that would settle it. The review is working outward from the closest generations and is nowhere near finished — so a page with no such line has not been looked at yet, which is a different thing from having been looked at and found wanting. The check mark on the parents line is older than this vocabulary and still says only proven or not; read the note if the distinction matters to you.
A marriage bond abstracted from the Clark County, Kentucky, court records and typed up in 1933 reads: Quisenberry, Stephen C., and Cloe J. Bush, daughter Ambrose Bush (consent); surety, Colby Bush. Dated 7 October 1844. Read on the filmed page rather than trusted from an index, it does two things at once — it puts the marriage three years before the birth of the daughter this tree descends from, and, because a bride under twenty-one needed her father's consent, it names her father. What took the rest of the day was establishing which Ambrose Bush: the same county holds two other men of that name, and both are ruled out by their own dates in the same volume. The date corrected an older note here that had it as 10 October, taken years ago from a memorial site this project no longer cites.
The will of Henry Foulkes senior of Nottoway County, Virginia — written in April 1808 and proved that September — was read end to end on the manuscript, all four pages. It names eleven children. Ten of them were already in this tree. The eleventh, a daughter called Nancy, was not, and now has a page of her own. And Edward Bass Fowlkes, whom this tree had carried as a son of that family, is not named in it — in any clause, in any spelling. He has not been quietly removed: no other father has been found for him, and the honest state of things is that he is still shown where he has always been shown, with no proof mark on his parents and a note on his page explaining what the will says. This is the ordinary shape of the work. A document you go looking for to confirm something can just as easily take it away, and the tree is more useful when it admits that than when it tidies it.
William S. Derrick died in Washington in 1852. His will sat in a box in the District of Columbia's archives, findable through a published index and orderable on a form; it was requested in late August and arrived three days later. In a single clause it names his wife and then all seven of his children — Lucretia Hart, Anna Louisa, Henry Clay, Josephine, Estelle, Clarence and Georgine Montgomery — in the order this tree already had them. One document, thirteen parentage marks: a mother proved for the daughter this family descends from, and both parents proved for her six brothers and sisters. Nothing about the shape of the tree changed. What changed is that it is now the record saying so, instead of a family historian writing in 1887.
This wing carries two ancestries — one for each side of the family — kept apart and counted separately, because they share no one and adding them together would mean nothing. Until late August, all of the proving had happened on one of them: on 21 August the second side carried no proven parentage at all. It now carries twenty-four. The evidence there is of a completely different kind. Most of these people died in Texas between the 1950s and the 2000s, inside the years the state issued death certificates, and a Texas certificate has a line for the father and a line for the mother's maiden name. Where the first side's hardest generations sit in Virginia and on the frontier before 1850, and a record naming somebody's parents very often simply never existed, this side had its answers waiting in a filing cabinet. The contrast is a fact about the records, not about the families. One link here had been written off in this project's own notes as blocked until 2031, waiting on a restricted record; it turned out to need a census page instead. The 1910 census records the father as single, the children begin arriving after that, and the 1920 census names the mother in the household with all four daughters — which leaves no room for anyone else.
The downloadable tree now has its own page — what the GEDCOM file holds, what is deliberately kept out of it, and the honest caveat about importing conclusions — linked from the landing page and every cousin door. The download itself is unchanged: the same dated snapshot, rebuilt from the master tree after every research pass.
A hundred images of the family's own papers arrived from the Wiltshire archive: four wills of Peter Temple in his own hand, the deeds of his son Samuel's 1722 marriage, and the receipt box his widowed daughter-in-law kept for twenty years. They resolved a puzzle the tree had carried for weeks, corrected four names a London clerk miscopied in 1738, and are now told as one seven-generation story — from a chancel burial on the River Wylye to a fatherless boy on the Rappahannock — linked from the Temple room, with every uncertain joint marked in the text.
Eight shared Google Photos albums are now linked from the family rooms, the cousin doors, and three person pages — scanned photographs for both sides of the family, an album each for Thomas Lewis Latané Temple Jr and III, and one for Ada Mae Johnson Catchings. The photos stay on Google; the site carries the pointers.
A doorway for every cousin. Share my grandparents and half this wing is your direct ancestry; share great-grandparents and a quarter is. Each door lights up your shared wedges of the fan, counts the ancestors we have in common, and hands you your rooms — start at Which door is yours?, linked from the landing page.
Three stories finished in early August are finally live: the two fathers the Revolution took from the Carpenter line (Valley Forge and Blue Licks), Finding Ann Waring, and the honest story of the hanged rebel Anthony Arnold and the English father our tree had to un-invent. Every subject's person page now links their story.
The tree-journalist agent's first leads, written and published: Anastasia Catching's 1807 will, signed with her mark; Abner Fowlkes, home from the war with one year to live; and an honest answer to the Mayflower question, graded link by link. All three are linked from their family rooms.
Eight family rooms — the story, the people, the records shelf and the honest grades for each of the eight directions. Five case files from the research's hardest junctions. And the moment machine: pick any date and meet the living cohort.
2,333 person pages, one for every named deceased person in the published tree — vitals, parents with proof badges, record transcripts, research notes kept verbatim, and family links to walk the tree by. Plus the places index, and click-through from the fan and the atlas map.
The landing, the eight directions, the atlas and the deep-time poster, the people index, and the tree itself as a free download.
The whole-tree overview and six family posts published in the blog's History category — the reading room on the landing page links them all.