Before the Internet and the modern digital world of massive online databases, genealogical research was the province of intrepid souls who tramped through weedy and insect infested graveyards, visited the musty basements of court houses under the watchful eye of the staff, met with distant relatives who were certain that their uninvited guests were agents of the federal government, and spent countless hours pouring over original or microfilmed documents housed at their state archives or at university libraries. Relatives were certain that some rumored family secret was about to be revealed for all to know about. Such was the life of a genealogist before the digital age.
And how you ask, do the authors of this website know about these things? It's because we began our search to find our roots some fifty years ago, long before the digital age. Countless hours were spent amassing and correlating thousands of facts into a coherent picture. That effort resulted initially in the 1983 publication of a hardcover book entitled
The McDowells of Northampton, Wake, Randolph, Guilford, and Davidson Counties, a revised and modern version of which can be found at this website by clicking
here.
Ultimately, after the arrival of Y-DNA testing, the original 1983 family tree generated by the authors was proven to be correct. Even better, connections to other family trees having the same Y-DNA were discovered. But that begged the question of what to do with the mountain of data collected by the authors for McDowell family trees that didn't share the same Y-DNA. And even more important, what were two retired men supposed to do with all their free time? The answer was simple: create this website by taking advantage of the modern digital environment, especially as regards genealogical searches and given that the authors had spent their lives working with computers and computer programming.
Several sources exist in the digital world for finding a person's family tree, but they are principally what the authors describe as a "begats" tree, although Public Member Trees at Ancestry.com includes links to original data that potentially reveal more about a specific person. Of course, there are published works of the same ilk that sometimes devolve into fanciful expositions of how wonderful their ancestors truly were. Of course, they all had the moral character of George Washington and were pillars of the community as well as the salt of the Earth.
This website takes a different tack, although we sometimes present oral history. Our goal is to find every extant piece of data about each person and to let the data tell the story. Of course, the mass of circumstantial evidence also helps to confirm family connections and to build family trees. An extremely important side benefit is that every piece of data has a place where it belongs, and if one collects every known fact from say, the Eighteenth Century in the United States, and succeeds in finding their place, then one is going to have the best possible rendition of all possible McDowell family trees from that century. Ambitious, you say! Is such a thing possible? This website is an effort to achieve that goal.
Aside from sometimes branching a genealogical tree to a modern day person for the purpose of confirming Y-DNA results, we generally stop the family trees presented herein before or near the time of the Civil War. Most people can work their family tree forward from that point and we avoid a truly massive database.
To find out more about the authors, we encourage everyone to visit us at our professional websites.
DEDICATION
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Harding Atlas McDowell
18 July 1920
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24 July 2020
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This website is dedicated to Harding Atlas McDowell, a letterman in baseball and soccer at High Point High School, a soldier who survived the Normandy Invasion and World War II, an avid golfer who played the game into his mid-90s, and an artisan whose creations in woodwork and furniture were of the highest quality. Dad, as the authors called him, enjoyed spending the last four decades of his life inspecting graveyards and meeting with distant relatives in the hope of finding yet one more clue as to his ancestry. He passed from this world knowing that Y-DNA testing proved that he was descended from one of the first McDowells to reside in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
