The purpose of this website is to provide a home for photos of our extended family and to document the research on our family history. Occasionally, you’ll also see posts of current family news such as birth of a baby, death in the family, graduations, and the like.
I’ve attempted to include history of both my Dad’s and my Mom’s side of the family. Dad’s family includes several surnames: Champion, Grooms, Richardson, Decker, Powell, Gibson, Whitson and Fowler. Mom’s family is much smaller and I’ve concentrated on a smaller number of surnames: Brown, Rainwater, Ledbetter and Stell.
Mom was a prolific collector of family photos. By the time of her death in 1964, she had assembled well over 2,000 photos of her family and Dad’s family, all of which had somehow ended up in a simple cardboard box. Fortunately, the cardboard box survived several moves including one across the state. I had glanced through the box on occasion but the volume of photos was daunting causing me to abandon any hope of organizing them. Finally, I embarked on a mission to digitize all these photos. The process was tiring but the outcome was a treasure of old family photos that could then be shared with the entire family via the web.
Digitizing the photographs revitalized an old desire to learn more about our family history. My grandfather, John Franklin Champion, is a prime example. He was orphaned at a young age and knew almost nothing about his parents. The identity of his parents has always been a Champion family mystery and the subject of many kitchen table discussions over the years. That mystery has now been solved. It turns out that John Franklin Champion’s father, Francis A. Champion, was injured in the Civil War, became seriously disabled, and eventually died from those injuries. The National Archives has almost a hundred pages of documents about the Civil War service of Francis and the Civil War Widow’s Pension Application of his wife and my great grandmother, Delilah Ann (Phillips) Champion. My Champion line research has taken me through 19th century Indiana and Kentucky and finally back to 18th century Virginia in an area that eventually became part of West Virginia.
The research is ongoing but much of the low hanging fruit has been picked; the digging has become more difficult; and finding nuggets of genealogical truth has become more elusive. I am confident, however, that more is waiting to be uncovered.
“You, however, will go to your fathers in peace and be buried at a good old age.” Genesis 15:15 (NIV)
Copyright © 2011 Garry E. Champion
