A now long-retired Air Force veteran, I am a very amateur (as in, unpaid, but also emphasizing the original French meaning of the word, meaning a " lover of" doing something), family-oriented "genealogist." A native-born resident of Chester County, PA (only recently returned after a more than 40-year absence).

As clearly evidenced by the following, I apparently 'suffer' from both "terminal verbosity" and "diarrhea of the fingers." :-D My apologies here and also, in advance, to any Contributor to whom I've sent/will send a long, detailed Suggested Edit, explanatory note in support of any Suggested Edits or Suggest Other Corrections submitted, or a request to add info to the Bio Section of any given memorial. Please know that those details are as a direct result of a lot of patient, careful research and time spent before they are submitted.

My maternal roots, I've now discovered, derive from New Jersey Vanderslice, Smith, Sack, Campbell, Kindell, and Adams roots (so far) in Camden, Salem, and Atlantic Counties, and my Pennsylvania roots from Vanderslice, Pinkerton, Pyle, Green, Ford, Drennen, Hartline, and Wilson lineage (so far) from Chester and Delaware Counties, with a few having migrated to Lancaster County. Thus far, my research has revealed that there is very, very little likelihood of my ever trying to sue any of my ancestors' estates or their heirs' estates, for any portion of their wealth, as for the most part, although I can now document some of my maternal lineage as far back as to documented veterans of both the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, they were all relatively dirt poor. I was very pleasantly surprised to have learned of some nearby Quaker ancestors here in Pennsylvania, but without exception, they all appear to have later been "excommunicated" or "shunned" for having married outside of the Society of Friends.

My paternal lineage includes the Baker, Wood, Francis, Debord/Deboard, and Higgins families, with a little touch of Shumate here and there, from Grayson County, Virginia, and Ashe, Wilkes, and Surry counties in North Carolina, with some later migrating to the coal mining areas of West Virginia in and around Beckley. Here too, I've found, there's an even more remote chance that I'll ever accidentally discover I'm entitled to an inheritance of any kind.

Since first joining Find A Grave (FaG) some 10 years ago now, the wonderment of finding out so much about my own maternal ancestral roots, mostly within just an 80-mile radius of where I was born and raised, has been an inspiration. Most of those ancestors, especially those who lived before a maternal great-grandmother whom I knew well in life, I'd never before known about for most of my 70+ years. I will always be grateful to those contributors before me who found and photographed their headstones, and added their memorials here, and as a result of their efforts I've now found, both digitally and physically, many of their final resting places and have been not only now able to visit them myself but have learned at least some small thing about their life stories.

Granted, my Profile will show that, to date, I've only added about 750 memorials, and now manage all of only about 1,000, only now about a third of which are those with whom I'm actually related by blood or by marriage. Those whom I can document as my being directly related to, in general, are the only memorials that I really care to manage. Of the now 550+ memorials listed in my "Created - Not Related" virtual cemetery, if you're even remotely related to the person in any memorial listed there that I've created, please feel free to Request a Transfer. While I'd appreciate some sort of reasonable explanation along with the request, I do feel that the "FaG Rules/Guidelines" regarding honoring transfers seem overly restrictive to me, and I personally believe those same "guidelines" are unfairly abused by some contributors with overly large egos, apparently somehow commensurate to the number of memorials they "maintain."

My whole purpose in creating, carefully, tediously, and one-by-one, these new "Created - Not Related" memorials is to try and ensure that somebody, someday might be able to find a name here that maybe wasn't here before, and in each case I also take great care to try to also link them, if I can, to their parents, spouses, siblings, children, and so on. I don't (and don't know how to, nor even want to know how to) use a database or a spreadsheet to add memorials. Each new memorial, and each new Suggested Edit made is the direct result of careful, in-depth research using Ancestry, a little intuition, being old enough be able to read cursive, and by following up on the "breadcrumbs" others have kindly left behind.

No longer physically able to walk cemeteries and photograph headstones, most all of the Suggested Edits I've made to other FaG contributors'/maintainers' memorials are based on my painstakingly slow and careful on-line research, and copies of any documents I used as source material will be happily provided to any contributor upon my receiving a direct e-mail request for such (and please have the basic courtesy of including your real name, as I've provided mine). My goal here is to try and fill in some of the blanks found in many existing memorials, such as, as I said, being able to link them to spouses, parents, children, and siblings; deciphering the handwriting in old Census, church, draft registrations, death, and birth records; checking multiple sources to try and determine their actual, legal names at birth (resulting from the all too common practice of nicknames being used on official records, especially in Census records); and discovering through Census and other records the places of their births, deaths, and marriages. I just recently exceeded 19,000 as the number of my Suggested Edits which have been accepted/approved by other contributors, and I find great joy in being notified of the acceptance/approval of my Suggested Edits. I have the time and inclination to do this on this website, and I understand that many others may not.

I will respond, either via the website or via a personal e-mail, to any and all correspondence from others. For those contributors, many of whom "maintain" those 10s and 100s of thousands of memorials who don't even have the common decency or basic courtesy to actively "accept" Edits, but instead by default by choosing to simply ignore some of my Suggested Edits, and especially some of my Transfer Requests, please, check your egos at the door and get over yourselves. Unless you're getting paid to do this (I'm not), I fail to understand your obvious obstinance.

Lastly, I understand that there are those who don't like the posting of death certificates (DCs) to memorials they manage. I find DCs to be a rich source of information which helps to, as I said, "fill in the blanks," and they aid in telling the story of someone's life. If any memorial manager (or relative) is offended by my having added a DC to a memorial, please feel free to e-mail me directly (rather than via the website), and I'll be happy to remove it. Please know that there are some DCs I've come across that I've elected not to post, or else I have even digitally redacted info from some of them, using discretion as necessary.

Having lost a maternal grandmother long before I was born, a paternal grandfather when I was but 2, and my mother when I was but 11, many of the "family stories" I was told (and firmly believed all my life until pretty recently and now in my early 70's) in my childhood about how or why they died turned out to be either completely false or else severely "sugar coated." Having completely fabricated information given to you, either as a child or as an adult, is not a kindness, methinks, especially when such wrong information potentially may have unnecessarily negative implications on one's or others' health history.

It is a real joy to have "met" here many fellow contributors and to have been able to establish a rapport with them, permitting an easy flow of information between us. I continue to be shown many kindnesses by some fellow contributors, to include their providing me with photos, newspaper obituaries, and the like, and am sincerely grateful to them.

A now long-retired Air Force veteran, I am a very amateur (as in, unpaid, but also emphasizing the original French meaning of the word, meaning a " lover of" doing something), family-oriented "genealogist." A native-born resident of Chester County, PA (only recently returned after a more than 40-year absence).

As clearly evidenced by the following, I apparently 'suffer' from both "terminal verbosity" and "diarrhea of the fingers." :-D My apologies here and also, in advance, to any Contributor to whom I've sent/will send a long, detailed Suggested Edit, explanatory note in support of any Suggested Edits or Suggest Other Corrections submitted, or a request to add info to the Bio Section of any given memorial. Please know that those details are as a direct result of a lot of patient, careful research and time spent before they are submitted.

My maternal roots, I've now discovered, derive from New Jersey Vanderslice, Smith, Sack, Campbell, Kindell, and Adams roots (so far) in Camden, Salem, and Atlantic Counties, and my Pennsylvania roots from Vanderslice, Pinkerton, Pyle, Green, Ford, Drennen, Hartline, and Wilson lineage (so far) from Chester and Delaware Counties, with a few having migrated to Lancaster County. Thus far, my research has revealed that there is very, very little likelihood of my ever trying to sue any of my ancestors' estates or their heirs' estates, for any portion of their wealth, as for the most part, although I can now document some of my maternal lineage as far back as to documented veterans of both the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, they were all relatively dirt poor. I was very pleasantly surprised to have learned of some nearby Quaker ancestors here in Pennsylvania, but without exception, they all appear to have later been "excommunicated" or "shunned" for having married outside of the Society of Friends.

My paternal lineage includes the Baker, Wood, Francis, Debord/Deboard, and Higgins families, with a little touch of Shumate here and there, from Grayson County, Virginia, and Ashe, Wilkes, and Surry counties in North Carolina, with some later migrating to the coal mining areas of West Virginia in and around Beckley. Here too, I've found, there's an even more remote chance that I'll ever accidentally discover I'm entitled to an inheritance of any kind.

Since first joining Find A Grave (FaG) some 10 years ago now, the wonderment of finding out so much about my own maternal ancestral roots, mostly within just an 80-mile radius of where I was born and raised, has been an inspiration. Most of those ancestors, especially those who lived before a maternal great-grandmother whom I knew well in life, I'd never before known about for most of my 70+ years. I will always be grateful to those contributors before me who found and photographed their headstones, and added their memorials here, and as a result of their efforts I've now found, both digitally and physically, many of their final resting places and have been not only now able to visit them myself but have learned at least some small thing about their life stories.

Granted, my Profile will show that, to date, I've only added about 750 memorials, and now manage all of only about 1,000, only now about a third of which are those with whom I'm actually related by blood or by marriage. Those whom I can document as my being directly related to, in general, are the only memorials that I really care to manage. Of the now 550+ memorials listed in my "Created - Not Related" virtual cemetery, if you're even remotely related to the person in any memorial listed there that I've created, please feel free to Request a Transfer. While I'd appreciate some sort of reasonable explanation along with the request, I do feel that the "FaG Rules/Guidelines" regarding honoring transfers seem overly restrictive to me, and I personally believe those same "guidelines" are unfairly abused by some contributors with overly large egos, apparently somehow commensurate to the number of memorials they "maintain."

My whole purpose in creating, carefully, tediously, and one-by-one, these new "Created - Not Related" memorials is to try and ensure that somebody, someday might be able to find a name here that maybe wasn't here before, and in each case I also take great care to try to also link them, if I can, to their parents, spouses, siblings, children, and so on. I don't (and don't know how to, nor even want to know how to) use a database or a spreadsheet to add memorials. Each new memorial, and each new Suggested Edit made is the direct result of careful, in-depth research using Ancestry, a little intuition, being old enough be able to read cursive, and by following up on the "breadcrumbs" others have kindly left behind.

No longer physically able to walk cemeteries and photograph headstones, most all of the Suggested Edits I've made to other FaG contributors'/maintainers' memorials are based on my painstakingly slow and careful on-line research, and copies of any documents I used as source material will be happily provided to any contributor upon my receiving a direct e-mail request for such (and please have the basic courtesy of including your real name, as I've provided mine). My goal here is to try and fill in some of the blanks found in many existing memorials, such as, as I said, being able to link them to spouses, parents, children, and siblings; deciphering the handwriting in old Census, church, draft registrations, death, and birth records; checking multiple sources to try and determine their actual, legal names at birth (resulting from the all too common practice of nicknames being used on official records, especially in Census records); and discovering through Census and other records the places of their births, deaths, and marriages. I just recently exceeded 19,000 as the number of my Suggested Edits which have been accepted/approved by other contributors, and I find great joy in being notified of the acceptance/approval of my Suggested Edits. I have the time and inclination to do this on this website, and I understand that many others may not.

I will respond, either via the website or via a personal e-mail, to any and all correspondence from others. For those contributors, many of whom "maintain" those 10s and 100s of thousands of memorials who don't even have the common decency or basic courtesy to actively "accept" Edits, but instead by default by choosing to simply ignore some of my Suggested Edits, and especially some of my Transfer Requests, please, check your egos at the door and get over yourselves. Unless you're getting paid to do this (I'm not), I fail to understand your obvious obstinance.

Lastly, I understand that there are those who don't like the posting of death certificates (DCs) to memorials they manage. I find DCs to be a rich source of information which helps to, as I said, "fill in the blanks," and they aid in telling the story of someone's life. If any memorial manager (or relative) is offended by my having added a DC to a memorial, please feel free to e-mail me directly (rather than via the website), and I'll be happy to remove it. Please know that there are some DCs I've come across that I've elected not to post, or else I have even digitally redacted info from some of them, using discretion as necessary.

Having lost a maternal grandmother long before I was born, a paternal grandfather when I was but 2, and my mother when I was but 11, many of the "family stories" I was told (and firmly believed all my life until pretty recently and now in my early 70's) in my childhood about how or why they died turned out to be either completely false or else severely "sugar coated." Having completely fabricated information given to you, either as a child or as an adult, is not a kindness, methinks, especially when such wrong information potentially may have unnecessarily negative implications on one's or others' health history.

It is a real joy to have "met" here many fellow contributors and to have been able to establish a rapport with them, permitting an easy flow of information between us. I continue to be shown many kindnesses by some fellow contributors, to include their providing me with photos, newspaper obituaries, and the like, and am sincerely grateful to them.