My great great grandfather, Francis Davis, in 1859 put quill to paper and recorded for posterity the lineage of the Davis` from that point in time to when we first immigrated to North America in 1690 from England.
That four page Davis letter has survived to this day and has become the basic road map to trace the Davis tree back to the mid 1600`s.
The letter remained in the family but it became clear soon after Francis` death that it was not very legible. In 1895 my great grandmother Sophia Youmans Davis took the initiative to transcribed the original to ensure posterity of the Davis family history.
The now duplicate Davis letters were passed down from generation to generation, with little thought of their importance. I can almost see them sitting in diffferent envelopes, banging around in drawers and boxes over the decades. Imagine family reading the Davis letter over the past two centuries, not realizing that they were becoming part of the story. The letters kept moving with family, from Ontario to Saskatchewan and then British Columbia before landing in my lap in 1999. Interestingly, they became more valuable as the years went by but were little appreciated.
Unbeknownst to me, a cousin I didn`t know existed at the time, Anita Fownes, was also searching for her families. Upon connecting with her it lit a fire under me, while at about the same time the "Davis letter" landed in my lap. That in and of itself is a story.
With the new found knowledge of the Davis letter and the on the ground education from cousin Anita, I started to delve into geneology records seriously.
As the years unfolded and I came to better understand the diligence required to confirm the reality of facts I was presented, I enlisted Ancestry.com as an entry portal to all things about family history. With the 21st Century commercialization of DNA testing it has added even more opportunties to mine existing data on the Internet.
Interestingly, the information about family increases daily as other families of our family also look to connect. It is like Christmas morning almost every day of the year.
Connecting the dots as to who is related to whom is very interesting but it can become rather boring after awhile. That is until you start asking the questions. Why? When? and How did my family first travel to North America.
That is when the stories start to emerge.........
The stories on this site are written to reflect the point of view of a specific reader, my grandhchilden with all references to relationships being from that point of view.
Ronald James Davis, Prince George, British Columbia
November 13, 2022