Genealogical & Historical Research

This page provides links to several of my ongoing projects that explore families of both European and African descent who lived in southeastern North America between the Colonial Period and World War I. Although my original motivation was to learn more about the backgrounds of these families, the work sometimes expanded into research on the local histories of the regions in which they lived. The areas studied range from seventeenth-century Colonial Virginia down the Atlantic seaboard to the Carolinas and Georgia in the eighteenth century, and then westward into the "Old Southwest," the vast expanse that became Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Despite this broad geographic sweep, beginning in the 1820s all of the families examined here ultimately converged in the Ouachita Valley of northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas, specifically in the region that in March 1839 became Union Parish, Louisiana.