Up a Tree

I'm going to switch to my side of the family for a few weeks. I want to note before moving on that in the early days of our marriage, it seemed as though we couldn't go much of anywhere in Texas without running into someone related to my mother-in-law's side of the family, especially the Lackeys.  For the accidental reader who knows naught of my background, I served as a pastor in the United Methodist Church in what is known as the Northwest Texas Annual Conference, an area that encompasses all the Texas Panhandle, much of the Southern Rolling Plains and parts of West Texas from Midland east a few towns past Abilene.  As we served churches in this conference, we would almost inevitably have someone related to my wife appear in church shortly after we began service in a particular church. I, unfortunately had little interest in the family trees of either side and failed to keep in touch with any of them. What a source of information they would have been. Lots of events and t...

One of "fun" parts of exploring the family tree, and yes, I put it in quotes to indicate I'm being sarcastic, is dealing with the program that provides me with the names and dates and places of our ancestors. I often find that the information I'm provided can suddenly change. For instance, in the attempt to find out whether the Reagan side of Sharon's family is somehow related to John Henninger Reagan, for whom Reagan County, Texas, is named, I used a feature of the program that finds if and how you're related to a specific person, though the search only goes back 15 generations.  I did find a relationship but through her mother's side of the family, the Lackeys. Because so many of the names seemed to have good connections with historical events I could research and mention here, I bookmarked John H. Reagan's entry. The program does not allow a bookmark to the results of the search, probably because it appears in a popup window, but I could easily clic...