Genealogical & Historical Research

This page highlights several ongoing projects tracing families of European and African descent in southeastern North America from the Colonial era through World War I. What began as a study of individual family histories naturally expanded into the broader local histories of the regions they inhabited. The research follows these families from seventeenth-century Virginia into the Carolinas and Georgia during the eighteenth century, and then westward into the emerging “Old Southwest”—the territories that became Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Beginning in the 1820s, these widely scattered families gradually converged in the Ouachita Valley, in the region that became Union Parish, Louisiana in March 1839.