Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Preview of Fawkner Chapter 10

Chapter 10 -- The Rest of James' Story -- is almost finished, and will burst upon the Internet early Thursday morning. This episode will take us back to east-central Illinois where we first picked up the Fawkner trail.

In the meantime, I'd like to remind readers of why I am using a blog to tell the Fawkner story. One motivation is simply to make the story available in easy-to-digest doses to my wife's extended family and to any other  Fawkner descendants out there who might stumble upon the blog. However, I have a second purpose: to demonstrate the one-piece-of-evidence-leads-to-another-question nature of genealogical and family history research. Proving parent-child relationships back in time is hard enough, but describing an ancestor's life requires following every lead and pursuing every possible record. Thus, I hope that the blog is both interesting for family members and of also of some educational value for unrelated genealogists and family history enthusiasts.

This is also a chance to remind readers that these posts are not intended as research reports. To enhance readability (and to keep production on a weekly schedule), I am loosely identifying sources in the narrative, but am not offering full source citations. If you want a full source citation for any statement of fact, please feel free to contact me. In fact, if all things go as planned (do they ever?), I will be publishing a more detailed, unified Fawkner family history with full source citations in the next year or two.

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