Welcome!  I'm so glad you came to visit our family's website and certainly hope you enjoy the stories about and photos of our family members.  This project is a work in progress and certainly has been fun for me.  The project has taken me, with my husband, Paul, to many locations in search of information about our family members and we are both amazed at the glimpse of character inferred from the information found about them.  Without question, more detail will be added to this tree for years to come.  Currently, I plan to add photos and short vignettes on a weekly basis, so you might care to check back from time to time to see what's new.  If you're willing and have information you can share about yourself, please send me a note.  I am interested in birthdates, spouses' maiden names, your children's names and birthdates, where you have lived, dates of marriage, baptism or divorce as well as documents like death or naturalization certificates.  If you'd care to send a photo for use in our family tree, I'll try to include it and if it's a hard copy, send it back to you.  Also, if you'd like to share a story or stories about someone in our family that you have known, please send that too.  Those family stories are so important.  While on this topic, I'd like to credit my parents, Virginia and Leslie Chamberlin, and my aunt, Bernice Jaeger, for sharing old family photos used for this project.  Some of the photos are also my own and hopefully, some photos will come from you.

While interested in extending our family tree and discovering new generations of family members, I am far more interested in conveying a sense of who these people were; their aspirations, work, loves, interests, challenges, travels, and other elements that defined them as individuals.  My belief is that one can understand a great deal about a person through their behavior and that these elements help to define a vibrant family history far more than a date of birth or a marriage certificate, although those have their place too.

To my thinking, history is not at all what most of us learned by studying a list of wars; The War of the Roses, the Crusades, the French and Indian War, the Revolutionary War, WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Viet Nam Conflict, etc.  Rather, history is better defined by the daily lives and choices made by our ancestors and we miss so much by focusing on conflict.  Yes, General Patton may have changed the course of World War Two in the Battle of the Bulge, but the persevering monk, Father Gregory Mendel, spent a lifetime by choice growing over 28,000 pea plants in his study of heredity.  His life's work formed the basis for modern day genetics.  On the micro level, Cousin Jimmy may have ended up in the slammer due to excessive drinking and fighting.  Somewhere along the way, we chose the negative, on a macro and micro level, as an approach to chronicling history, but our real accomplishments, the gifts we give one another, are discovered by examining our activities over a lifetime.  That is the reason our family's oral history is so important.  Some of us are certainly descendents of Charlemagne or Paul Revere, but that doesn't define who we are.  I think it's more important to know that one's aunt moved forward through illness, the loss of most of her family members and loneliness but remained positive and maintained a sense of humor throughout her life.  That knowledge is far more important since it provides me with a role model and gives me hope about my personal potential.  If you read some of the stories here, I hope you come away with the same sense of pride and optimism.  Certainly not all, but many of our family members and ancestors lived incredible lives.