Welcome to my online reference notes.
I started out in genealogy trying to find where my great, great granddaddy came from. And along the way, I've met a lot of nice folks, some kin, some not, many of whom were as confused as I was about the Fowler family. So I cleaned up my notes, added the sources (where I knew them), and started telling folks where to find what I have.
Who's responsible for this site?
That would be me; Kenneth Leon Fowler.
My line (working backwards) is: Pop Abbie Leon Fowler (still living, thank you) Granddaddy Frank Deforiest Fowler (b: GA, 1890 - d: TX, 1972) G-grandaddy Leon Fowler (b: GA, 1868 - d: TX, 1940) Gg-grandaddy Hilliard Judge Fowler (b: GA, 1844 - d: TX, 1936) Ggg-grandaddy Joel Asbury Fowler (b: SC, 1823 - d: GA, 1894) Gggg-grandaddy Drury Andrew Fowler (b: SC, 1798 - d: ?, ?) Ggggg-grandaddy Joel Fowler (b: SC, ca1780 - d: GA, 1853) Gggggg-grandaddy John Fowler (b: ?, ca1740 - d: SC, ca1791) Before this, I have only hints that I am still chasing. I think is goes like this: Ggggggg-grandaddy Godfrey Fowler (b: VA, ca1710 - d: ?, ?) Gggggggg-grandaddy Godfrey Fowler (b: VA, ca1670 - d: ?, ca1747) Ggggggggg-grandaddy John Fowler (b: England, bef.1642 - d: VA, bef.1683)
You don't have anything about the New England Fowlers
True. And I may never have. These are my notes about my line and, from what I can find, we came in through Virginia and have always been Southerners (although not necessarily rebels).
Anyway, I'm not trying to "collect'em all". If you're looking for the Fowler maiden from New England who married the missionary and went to Hawaii in the 1700s, she's not listed here. Nor is the Fowler who was jailed in California in the 1800s just before he set sail for Hawaii with a shipload of guns to foment a revolution against the Hawaiian Royalty. Nor the Fowler who was hung for murder in New Mexico in the 1800s.
I'm researching and trying to document my line. There will be references to the allied families, but I probably won't chase them very far. And while I may encounter interesting characters, if they're not in my line, they're not here.
Haven't I seen this somewhere else?
Possibly. From 2000 until early October 2003, these pages were hosted at Texas Metronet in Dallas, Texas. Then, on the night of October 10th, at about 5:30pm, Texas Metronet turned off their machines. I know when it happened, since I was online at the time. There was no warning, no email, no "wall" message, no nothing.
In the next two weeks, upset customers deduced that a new owner of the ISP apparently decided to merge the Dallas operation with an existing operation he had in Houston. It appears never to have occurred to him (or his staff) that orphaning the paying customers might create hard feelings.
In retrospect, I was luckier than many. All I lost was a website image and an email address that I had used for over ten years. Some customers were hosting business websites with Metronet and they and their customers are really upset.
So if the rest of this site looks familiar, you may be remembering the Metronet site. And if you bookmarked http://www.metronet.com/~klfowler, you can delete that bookmark. If you would care to make note of this site, your occasional visits would please me.
What programs do you use to generate this HTML?
The HTML here is hand-written using either notepad (under Windows) or vi (under UNIX/Linux).
My research collection is a horrifying mish-mash of photocopies, emails, .doc, .rtf and .txt files, and an out-of-date Family Tree Maker database. I couldn't find anything that would create the type of reference pages that I wanted from all of those inputs, so I started writing HTML to try to figure out what I wanted. By the time I worked out a format that I liked, I had most of the site coded.
Some day I may go back and write some custom code that will let me auto-create pages from an SQL database, but for now, this works.
You don't show sources for everything.
True. I show the source for everything that I can and multiple sources when I can. But if I don't show a source for a particular date, or if it says ca or abt., then I am not sure about that item. And you should not take it as gospel-truth.
Look, there's a lot of bad data out on the internet. And half of what is available from FTM or LDS is not only wrong, it will never get corrected. So my standard is: if I have a solid source, I will show it. If the source is not shown, I don't trust that piece of data and neither should you.
So why show something I don't trust? Because I can use it as a clue to help me in my search for a good source.
Shouldn't I document where I found the questionable data? Maybe. But I don't want to appear to give credibility to data that I don't trust. So I don't show cruftholm.
Why are you trying to copyright the family data?
I'm not. Facts cannot be copyrighted. My original work can.
What I do claim copyright on is the HTML code I wrote and the presentation of the data. You are perfectly welcome to copy as many / much of the facts presented here as you can use. But you may not copy the entire page and claim that you put in the time and effort to write the code.
From a practical point of view, my HTML code may have bugs in it. (I don't think so, but it could happen.) I don't want someone to take my (possibly buggy) code, run it, and then decide that they have in someway been damaged and try to sue me.
Additionally, there are some pages here that I wrote which are my expressions or opinions. Obviously I don't want some else to "file the serial numbers off" and claim that they are the author.
If you think that something I wrote is worth copying, just see that I am credited as author. Fair enough?
Your email should reach me at: kenfowler_genealogy (at) yahoo.com
Thanks for visiting.
Ken Fowler
formerly: klfowler (at) metronet.com
old site: http://www.metronet.com/~klfowler
Copyright © 2004, Kenneth L. Fowler
Last update: 0403.21