The Past in the Present

Genealogical Gleanings


My granddaughter, Nora Robinson


"Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years."

- Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe.
     Introductory excerpt - p 1.

I am one of those, found in every family, who is made the "keeper of things genealogical," so one of my pasttimes has been to gradually organize accumulated material and search out new. In 1720 Thomas Betterly married Elizabeth Alden, whose grandfather had been charged as a warlock in Salem, in King's Chapel. Two Betterlys fought in the American Revolution, and the son of one drifted into Huntington Township in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania when it was still a largely a frontier. I am like most Americans in that the majority of my forbears came from Europe in the 19th Century, 

My Parents, John Austin Betterly
Margaret Allan Palmer
c. 1928
and I am a mixture of many strains - Somersetshire miners, Cornish fisherman, Welshman from Glamorganshire, and Pennsylvania Dutch. A Dane wandered to the Isle of Man, and his or her descendant married a Welshman named William R. Matthews and came to the New World about 1850. A Betterly fought at Gettysburg, and my great-grandfather John Thomas, himself but a babe when his Welsh family came over, died prematurely from illnesses acquired at the sreige of Peterburg, Virginia. I have found drifters and bounders and scoundrels. None were rich, few were educated, and not a few were eccentric.

The names are legion, for I now have more than 1,200 people in my file, with branches and twigs spanning from Germany to California and from the 15th Century through the 20th Century - so far. There are Betterlys, Matthews, Palmers, Thomases, Evanses, Crockers, Johns, Sterners, to mention but a few.

I would encourage those of you who have not begun to trace your roots to do so. The internet belongs to genealogists, and you can find out much more, and more quickly, than you might believe.




My grandsons, Collin and Ryan Barkley



Links to other sites on the Web

Home Page
Cousin John in Minnesota
A Brief Bio
A Family Gallery
Military Page
Folks I Have Known and Loved

History, like God, can only be imagined.

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