Blogs

One of the nice things about migrating to this platform is how easy it is to run any necessary updates. So far, so good.

Since the news has been full of information about Maria Shriver and her marital issues these days, it's hard not to hear an earful. But for those of us in the Mid-Atlantic, the news may serve more as a reminder that Maria's roots are her in the Mid-Atlantic, thanks to her Shriver ancestors. I knew that her father's family were from Maryland and Pennsylvania, but had not realized that her family lines also contained quite a few connections to the Ferrees of Lancaster county and the Prestons of Bucks county. It truly is a small world where you start looking at your roots!

Sometimes, in the course of our research, we come across stories that really make us wish we could travel back in time to learn more. I found one such story recently concerning the well-known Pennock family of Chester County. By all standards, Charles Pennock was an upstanding citizen - a successful Philadelphia businessman and very well-known president of the prestigious Delaware Valley Ornithological Society, where his work was considered among the finest in the country at the time.

With the weather being absolutely delightful here this week, I took advantage of a free afternoon to make a short trip over to Fawn Grove to photograph the Friends cemetery there. The burial ground there is fairly small, so it didn't take that long to photograph all the stones, a bit under 400 altogether. What is probably confusing to folk s who visit the area is that the Friends meetinghouse there and it s burial ground are not identified with signs of any type, so it's not immediately obvious that it is separate from the larger Methodist church next to it.

I had originally started building this site as a predominantly Pennsylvania site, but then it dawned on me that there was a lot of data that I wanted to include from my other sites that was not strictly from Pennsylvania, and so my concept has expanded to include more of the region. That being said, the bulk of the data will still be from Pennsylvania, but there will also be some information from some of the nearby states as well.