Back Roads to Home

BACKROADS TO HOME, The Coming Together of Family -- Migrating into a new world, thousands of individuals came to America to establish homes, families, and lifestyles. Surviving the challenges and hardships involved, they settled the frontier and contributed to the growth, well-being, and prosperity of their adopted country. One by one, family by family, their individual destinies and heritages would survive to come together in the future at a fateful intersection of time, place, and circumstance. This book, Four Roads to Home, is first and foremost a genealogical examination of four family's arrival in America to take advantage of the freedom they sought and found. It is equally important as a historical treatise exemplifying all those American families who braved the frontier, ventured into the wilderness, and created the country we know today. In both cases, it is the story of us. Arriving in America at different times and places, the fathers, mothers, and children described in this narrative moved westward across a growing nation building new lives and homes. They fought the battles, raised families, buried loved ones in strange lands, and watched their children grow up and leave home to continue the journey. With ancestral beginnings in Colonial Virginia and North Carolina, from the Province of Pennsylvania and the State of Missouri, the four families experienced the anxieties and anguish of leaving home, of life and death, of success and failure. Not all of them made it, fathers and mothers died, babies were born dead, and disease and accidents took their toll, but more importantly, and despite the hardships and disappointments, each family knew and prospered on the satisfaction and exhilaration of success. As their own families grew, and new opportunities presented themselves, each family responded by wandering farther westward into the frontier landscape of America. Within the scope of their persistence, courage, and boldness, the men, women, and children featured herein traveled across the vast breadth of the centuries to pass forward the pride and spirit of their ancestral heritage. And then, one day, alongside an unremarkable, faraway crossroads, these four families complete their destiny, a son meets a daughter, and together, they face the future as one family!