My search started over a year ago...

and I signed up for the 14 day trial at Ancestry.  I then started making calls to find out as much information as I could from relatives who could provide names to get me started.  A lot of research had already been done on my mother's side, so I focused on my father's side.  I made phone calls to people I barely knew in hopes that they would be willing to share information.  I was grateful when my uncles gave me the base to get started.  My father passed in 2002 so I would have to start with relatives I barely knew.

The surnames are Smith, Dunagan, Patten, Mckaig, Jones and Harris beginning in Oklahoma.  I can remember tidbits of stories from my father of preachers riding shotgun with a bible in their hand going from church to church; circuit preachers. A story of a Smith whose wife died.  He was a very handsome man and caught the eye of many ladies.  He ended up fooling around with a married woman and came home one day dead on the back of his horse.  Rumor was he got caught.  There would be no death certificate on him I was told.  Don't know what Smith that may have been as of yet.  George Washington Smith remarried and lived to an old age.  A lot of documentation on him so...  James Thomas Smith would be a likely candidate.  He left his wife and six children in Pennsylvania.  Told his wife "he was going to go kill Indians" and never came back.  James met up with my great grandma, Maggie May Patten, in Oklahoma.  He was 26 years her senior.  She was a school teacher.  He married her and lived to a relatively old age of 69.  So not quite sure on this oral story.  Could be a story the elders told to keep the young men in line, lol.  If your wife dies, you go marry a single or widowed woman.  You don't mess around with a married one as you might end up dead.

I have put preliminary info in the pages and just discovered how "links" work.  This is a work in progress and looking forward to seeing this evolve.

Intro

I think I am getting the gist of this blogging.  Spent many hours learning "how to" and I am expecting this blog will improve in time as I learn the ins and outs. 

I started researching my ancestrial tree over a year ago.  My Grandmother Elsie Craddock Fleming had been researching her genealogy for years in the days before the Internet.  What a task it was waiting patiently for information that today, parts of, we can get instantly.  I think of her sometimes and smile thinking of how much she would of enjoyed exploring genealogy on the Internet.  I have a lot of her research notes which has helped me find information that may have taken years to find otherwise. 

My father, Joseph Smith, spent many hours talking to me about his side of the family in my late 20s.  To my pleasant surprise a lot of the oral family history I  remember has, in fact, been true.  Joe told me he spent a lot of hours helping his mother in the kitchen and, while doing so, was present when the family stories were talked about around the kitchen table.  He was also known to have a phenomenal memory.  I think of him and  know he would of been thrilled to see the records that verified the stories told to him during his childhood years.  He had insisted that "I would not be able to go back on the Smith side too far as the g grandpa had been killed and the children orphaned".  (From a conversation I had with him in early 90s before the days of Internet the way we have today).  His story was right but the trail not lost!!  He told me the Dunagans helped Daniel Boone build his log cabin and the Smiths .... with Davy Crockett.  ... as I do not remember exactly what he said of the Crocketts.

My mother took an interest in genealogy and worked for years on the Swedish side of our tree.  She was unable to link up to the ancestors in the "old country" of Sweden.  Not knowing who the parents of our immigrants from Sweden were, she posted a message on Ancestry.  Five years went by.  One day she received a message from a man in Sweden telling her that he believed his family were the descendants of the immigrants she had been looking for in Sweden.  And they were!  Amazing.  In this instance it was the distant relatives from the old country contacting the descendants of the ancestors who immigrated. 

I dedicate this blog in memory of Elsie Margaret Craddock, my maternal grandmother, and Joseph Thomas Smith, my biological father. 

Elsie Margaret Craddock: 1918 - 1992

Joseph Thomas Smith