Welcome family and friends!  As many of you know, for several years I have maintained a separate Ayers-Derrie Family Tree on Ancestry.com. Now, I will be also using this website/blog as a companion site to add stories and extra information that I have gathered during my research about ancestors shown in the tree.

Family trees with just names, dates, locations, etc can be very dry reading.  However, the ancestors depicted on those trees lived very real lives with many things happening to them. They had relationships and jobs, fought in wars, survived natural disasters and diseases, and lived in interesting times. We stand on their shoulders as they overcame great personal hardships to survive and allow us to be alive today. They fought hard and never gave up!  Our Ayers-Derrie ancestors can be traced back to colonial times and their lives are woven into the fabric of American history over the centuries.  My goal is to post articles to this website which will add some of that color and texture to our ancestor names.

Suggest you visit the page tabs at the top to get feel for what this vehicle is trying to accomplish. I hope to publish new articles on a fairly regular basis.  I promise to constantly fight my obsession for things always to be perfect before sharing. So, sometimes the articles may not be as “finished” as I would normally prefer them to be.  Please understand that the information you read on this website may not be always 100% correct, but it is to the best of my knowledge and research.

I will categorize the posts into topics along the lines of General Information, Factoids, or more commonly by family Surnames.  The list of categories will be shown in the right hand column and will grow as I add new posts.  Also, all posts will be archived for search and retrieval by you the readers. Feel free to click around on the site to see how it works.  If you get temporarily lost, you can always click on the “Home” tab and get back to the front.  Also, you can typically click on most graphics to get a larger view.

Folks, at the bottom of each post you can click on “Leave a Comment”, and I sincerely hope that you will take advantage of the opportunity to chip in your thoughts and perspectives as the spirit moves you. Also, there is the provision to click on the star to signify that you like the post.  I look forward to any and all comments which will be viewable to other readers as well.  Keep in mind this is a public website/blog. However, I have requested that it not be registered by search engines. So, there is only limited privacy.