Mending a Broken Branch

In 1989, I struck a broken branch while searching my Smith lineage and it halted my efforts. My interests soon changed from exploring the past to living in the present.  All my notes and correspondences sat tucked away in a corner of my musty basement, gathering dust.

Fourteen years later, my oldest son came home from middle school with an interesting social studies task entitled, Family Tree Project.  The year was 2003, and by that time, the advent of the Internet made it possible to discover all kinds of information right at your fingertips.  I felt a flutter of excitement as I dusted off my old notebooks, and a giddy feeling came over me thinking that maybe there was more information to uncover.   

With uncertain anticipation, I raced to the computer.  I do not recall exactly how I found the website I used, Roots Web.com, a free website affiliated with Ancestry.com.   Roots Web is a great place to start a family search since it is comprised of thousands of family histories people have contributed to the site.

Was the illusive information I had been seeking for so many years about the Smiths now right before my eyes?

What I uncovered on that day was that John and Anastasie (Dupuis) Smith were married in North Guilford, Connecticut in 1769.  North Guilford, Connecticut?   I never knew until that very moment that I was a descendant of a New England colonist.  On that fateful day, it took me about thirty minutes to trace the Smith family all the way back to 1634 to Thomas Smith, known as the Father of the Connecticut Smiths!

This 1758 map of Connecticut shows where Thomas Smith lived.

The school project was finished, but my notes were no longer going to sit idly in the corner. The search continued as I began checking sources and revealing more fascinating stories about my ancestors.