Welcome

 

   Family is a powerful institution.  Knowing that you belong to a family gives encouragement, empowerment and strength to endure, experience and accept life’s adventures.  The unity of family gives each of us hope and determination to create greater legacies to pass on.  Family is powerful enough to allow us to use the strength of family to be people of great character and integrity.  Family is also powerful enough to provide the spiritual connection we need in order to survive as individuals.

 

   Have you yet met the cousin who has similar features as you?  Maybe your children have similar features of a great uncle or great aunt.  Perhaps you have a similar occupation or mannerisms as your grandfather or grandmother.  Have you yet discovered what an uncle or aunt sacrificed in order for family to prosper and become stronger?  Discovering family has proven to be an interesting and rewarding endeavor.  Finding out where our ancestors come from and where they ended up, passing on what they worked for, is quite interesting as well.  Research gives us interesting things about our relatives to look at and wonder.  Things like both Peter Jackson and Wyatt George had 13 children that we know of.  Both men have descendants that live in Magnolia, Arkansas.  Peter had 2 wives and Wyatt had 4.  Wyatt, born in Virginia, migrated to Arkansas and his name is spelled on the 1880 census as Wiet.  Peter Jackson must have been a man who wanted to be counted because he was a registered voter in 1866.  Peter was born in Alabama and moved to Louisiana.

 

   There are many things to find out about our relatives.  Where are more descendants of Peter Jackson and Wyatt George that we have not yet discovered?  Could you have stood in line at the grocery store with a cousin?  Maybe a great aunt was one of the missionaries at the church you visited last week.  Perhaps your 4th generation cousin works for the doctor’s office you go to.  You never know.

 

   One day as my father-in-law was mailing his registration to the George/Jackson reunion in 2004 and asks to buy a stamp at the grocery store.  The store clerk wanted to know where he was mailing it to and he told her Magnolia, Arkansas.  What do you know?  That is where her family was from.  Research revealed that his 3rd generation cousin was working at this grocery store that he often shopped in. You never know.

 

   Be encouraged to appreciate family.  Be encouraged to find out more and to find those that belong to us.  You might be somewhere and meet someone with the last name George or Jackson.  Will you be bold enough to ask, "Where is your family from”?  That is what we do.  Sometimes in person and sometimes over the Internet.  Be amazed, informed, bewildered, enlightened, and maybe shocked. Sometimes it turns into a new adventure, ask.  Family is important!

 

 

 Rachel A.M. Jackson
“Preserver of Family History”