A Word from the Compiler of this Family Tree Scrapbook

This Scrapbook was first generated in 3-ring binders and distributed to nearly a dozen branches of our family in the mid-90s. It contained just about everything I knew about my ancestors at that time. Since then, the Internet has come into play, first as a source of information, and now as a means of distributing the information.

I have now chosen to use this method for distributing new information that I gather and synthesize. With it, owners of the original scrapbooks can keep them updated if they wish, and with it, those who do not have scrapbook can conceivably build one out of the information on this site. ~~Esther Gross

What is a family? In the strictest sense down through the centuries, a family has meant a father, a mother, and their children. But a family is more than that.

Every family has a horizontal dimension. Any family in any given time reaches out in multiple branches and webs, each growing and developing other branches of its own. Anyone who tries to document family history, particularly on a computer database, runs into this. Every entry, every person, every relationship leads to another—without end. Perhaps the most visual illustration of this can be seen at a family funeral.

Every family also has a vertical dimension. No one on earth since Adam ever got here without being an integral part of many others. Each of us is an incredibly blended, yet completely unique, combination of those who have gone before us. We are who we are because of who they were. So when I see plants outside my great-great-grandmother’s kitchen door and discover a kitten in Grandfather George’s hands in a pre-1908 family portrait, my heart says, yes! Those are my people, and part of them is still a part of me. (If you’re not into plants or kittens, that’s okay—you came from a lot of other people with other interests, too!)

Have you ever thought about the fact that the only people on earth who have exactly the same ancestral heritage are biological brothers and sisters? And what about adoptees? Does this leave them out of the picture? Of course not! Just as in adoption they are given a name, a legal status, a family to love and to love them (and a multitude of other things), so they are also given the gift of ancestors! They are bona fide family members along with the rest of us.

With every marriage a whole new set and combination of ancestors is brought into the pictures. Each new family unit that is created adds multiple new dimensions to the family.

Put in the simplest terms, each of us is a link in a chain. All of us are both descendants and ancestors. Many of us believe that the place of each one of us in the chain, both backward and forward in time, is of God’s particular design for each one. It was He who planned my personal “window in time” to be born in this century, not the last one or the next one.

What is a family history scrapbook? This one is an informal compilation of family history. Professional genealogists might be unhappy with my casual approach to documentation. I do have a database with all the dates and information I have collected on close to a thousand people, and I have most of the letters and notes I have acquired over the years. My purpose here has been not so much to document as to breathe life into these who otherwise often seem not only dead but irrelevant and unknowable.

Even at that, the stories here are not perfect. They undoubtedly contain unintentional inaccuracies. I apologize for them in advance. It has been a pleasure to put it together—and I’m not done yet. I still have a couple other branches of the family that I haven’t gotten into scrapbook form. The most recent generations are harder to pull together than the older ones because there is so much information that it is hard to know where to start. And now that I am acquiring information via Internet connections, some of it is piling up faster that I can process it for addition to the scrapbook!

How this book came about is, not surprisingly, a long story. For years I was interested in family history, and I collected information. Back in the 60s, I somehow made contact with two “fellow descendants,” Mary Ellis Schoenborn on the Porter side and Ruth Stauffer (a Stauffer by marriage, with her husband very interested in the subject). Both provided me with much valuable information. Some pursuits turned out profitable, many were dead ends. But I never knew what to do with it all. So for years it sat around in my head and on pieces of paper.

Nineteen ninety-two was a watershed year for this life-time hobby. That summer I had the pleasure of taking different family members on two “heritage tours” back to the ancestral sites in and around Grand Rapids. We took lots of pictures (some of the ones you can see on this site). I took along the ancestral pictures we have from the family tree footlocker, which had come to us through my mother from her mother. At each of the graves we displayed the pictures and I read a profile of the person(s) there. We also had opportunity to visit with the current owners of both ancestral farm homes—and even to take a couple of pictures inside.

Within a month after those trips, I ran in someone with a scrapbook similar to this, and suddenly I knew what to do with all my info! I knew what my hobby would be for the next couple of years (it turned out to be three even in the initial form). I began expanding the profiles and pulling together everything on which I had information. Since then, as I’ve said, the information has proliferated, including learning many things that I assumed were lost forever.

When I discovered that it was possible to make reproductions of both color snapshots and long-ago pictures, I knew then had the means to reproduce my scrapbook for others. That task ended up being more complex and time-consuming than I had anticipated, especially as I continued to learn discover more information. I hope you will have as much fun perusing the scrapbook as I have had putting it together.

For each “descendant” who picks up this book, the people in it are only a partial set of ancestors. With the exception of my sister, everyone looking at this information, (including my own children) have other ancestors that I have no part in. I hope this scrapbook will whet you appetite to research and document them, too. If you have older members in your family, anyone a generation or two older that you, I urge to you learn what you can from them while you can. When they are gone, it will be too late!

So welcome! To what? To the world of some very real people. Without them, none of us would be here! Have fun!

Esther Moneysmith Gross