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This is a preliminary draft of a work in progress. It is a continuation of a project started by my mother, Ava Pearl KRESS ROBERTS, in 1969. As many of us do in our later years, she began wondering about her ancestors and began to contact those that she believed might have information from the past. She shared much of her information with me. I found it interesting and encouraged her to continue her research but, I was busy with my job and family and didn’t have the time to get involved. That reminds me of the man that said, “We all have the same amount of time - 24 hours a day. What we do with it is determined by our priorities.” My priorities were elsewhere at that time. As I look back now, I regret the missed opportunities that were available but have since passed.
My mother did not have a computer, nor would she have known what to do with it. She had never heard of a GEDCOM, the Internet or a CD-ROM. She did not have access to, nor did she know how to research the census data or government records. She never learned to drive and therefore depended on others to take her anywhere she went. All that she had was a few addresses, time and curiosity. Through one of her cousins, she managed to contact a first cousin of my father, Mayme Georgia STEPHENS WATKINS, who had been researching her STEPHENS ancestors. Mayme lived in Boonville, Indiana at that time. Boonville, Warrick County, and the surrounding area are rich with our ROBERTS ancestors' past. Mayme gave mother a great deal of information on our STEPHENS line and we added to what she had.
I didn’t do any more research until after I retired. By then my mother and all of her sources of information had passed away. We started having an annual ROBERTS reunion in Hobbs, New Mexico; the first one being on June 8, 1991. We tried to contact some of the relatives that had moved away but did not have much luck at getting them to attend. Then, after my granddaughter was born, my son asked me for some information to put in her family record book. When I started looking for some of the information that he had requested, I came across some unanswered questions in some of my mother’s papers. I started looking for the answers, and, I was hooked. As anyone who has ever done genealogical research knows, one answer leads to two more questions.
After we retired from Texas Tech University, my wife, Joan, and I traveled through seventeen states and visited the counties and towns where these people lived. We have not just spent a few days or even weeks doing this research. In some cases, we have spent several months in one state. We have read County records of land purchases and visited more cemeteries than I care to talk about. We have read old newspapers with headlines talking about World War I, followed by the obituary of my great grandmother. I have come to know that these people are not JUST our ancestors. They were real people who lived rough lives and lost loved ones from hardships that we can’t even imagine. We have visited the state capitols in all of those states and learned something about their history. We have visited the state archives and learned how to search microfilm of the US census and old newspapers. I have held in my hand the actual documents used when my great-great-grandfather enlisted in the Union Army in 1862. Before our trip in 1997, I didn’t even know his name or that he was in the “War of the Rebellion” as the Yankees called it. I have learned more about the Civil War and the people that fought it than I can remember ever reading when I was in school. I have paid for birth certificates and death certificates of people that I didn’t know existed a few years ago. I have also paid for record searches that turned up nothing. I have mailed many letters to strangers with mixed results. We have found cousins that we never knew existed before by writing letters to addresses found in the telephone book. Many times we have gotten discouraged when it seems like we will never find the answer to one of our questions. But occasionally we make a link or solve a puzzle and it renews the thrill of the hunt.
When mother gathered the information about her ancestors, she didn’t know how to arrange it into family record sheets and just kept it on sheets of paper. Mostly she just kept the letters that she received from the individuals that she wrote to seeking information. She had no intention of writing a book or family narrative. It was after I started arranging the information that it began to fall into place. I simply wanted to collect the notes and various pieces of information into a form that would be easy to understand and facilitate further research. This collection of information is the result.
I was a computer programmer for several years and still enjoy playing with home computers as well as family research as some of my hobbies. Genealogy and computer programming have several similarities, one of which is a big problem. One of the rules in programming is you never let the programmer decide when the project is completed. A bad programmer wont do a complete job and a good programmer is never satisfied. As most genealogists know, one can never satisfactorily complete a family tree. I fear the same will be true for this web site. I will be making changes and additions as time allows. Please come back and visit me again.
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