Genealogical & Historical Research

This page gives links to some of my ongoing projects that investigate certain families of European or African descent who lived in southeastern North America between the Colonial Period and World War I. Although my desire to learn more about the background of these families originally motivated this work, in several cases this led to research into the local history of the regions in which they lived. The specific locations studied range from Colonial Virginia of the 1600s southward along the Atlantic seaboard to the Carolinas and Georgia in the 1700s, and then westward into the "Old Southwest," the vast expanse that became the states of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Although this includes a massive geographical area, beginning in the 1820s, all of the families studied here converged upon the Ouachita Valley of northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas, and specifically, to the region that in March 1839 became Union Parish, Louisiana.