The people we come from
These are our ancestors. Every name below is a doorway into real lives: people who crossed oceans and deserts, worked cement plants and coal mines and farms, buried children, built houses, kept the faith or found it or wrestled with it, and raised the families that eventually led to ours. Learn about them. Discover who they were.
We love and honor them, and we try to see them whole. They struggled. They were not perfect, any more than we are. Where the record shows their hard days and their human flaws, we give them grace and understanding, the same grace we hope our own descendants will one day extend to us. They are our roots, and a tree does not get to be embarrassed by its roots; it gets to be grateful for them.
The pages in this collection gather what we have found so far: histories, photographs, letters, and memories, presented as faithfully as we can. The work is never finished. If you carry one of these names, or a story about someone who did, you are part of this too.
“And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers . . .” --Malachi 4:6