The following pages are the result of research and study during leisure hours snatched from an active business life of the last ten years. No other seems to have made any effort to collect or preserve any extended record of this family, and the facts here recorded have been compiled from wills, deeds, Friend's records, family bibles, tombstones, and such like original sources. While the disentangling of a great mass of constantly increasing material has often been very preplexing, the self imposed labor has been one of pleasure and has been pursued, more as a recreation than a task. The whole has been gathered, item by item, a little from this one and a little from that one, one fact from one source and another elsewhere.<br><br>The author is well aware of the incompleteness of the work, but to those who understand the subject this needs no apology. The lack of fuller details, in many instances, has been owing to apparrent apathy and the want of cooperation on the part of many who might have furnished imporant data. Absolute accuracy has been aimed at so far as has been possible, but in a work like this, where proper names and dates are enumerated by thousands, it is quite probable there are occasional errors.