Welcome, South Descendants!

This is my first blog post (ever) and it's to let you know that I am starting work on a task to share information about our many, many ancestors on the South side: hence, the name of the blog, SOUTHSIDERS. As a retired history teacher and librarian, it kind of makes sense that discovering and sharing family history is a real passion for me. What can you expect from this blog? Every now and then, depending on how much the present intrudes on my interest in the past, I will post what I have found about our ancestors researching online or elsewhere. I intend to start with those farthest back--let's say my 10x great grandparents--and then move forward to the persons who would have been grandparents to either Virginia Caroline Wright South or "granddad South" (as Dan called him), Charles Emmett South. 

This site will preserve all the blog entries, so don't worry that you will have to read one as soon as it appears. If you use the service below this entry to receive them by email (recommended), then you will be alerted when something new pops up. Or you can check the web address http://www.danasouthpope.com any time. I hope you will disseminate this address to your kids and cousins to reach all our Souths. I am not sure how long this journey into the past will take us, but it won't be instant.

As I shared with some of you, I have found that the vastly increased numbers of people now on Ancestry.com, coupled with the increased numbers of those who have paid for Ancestry's access to international records, and the capability of Ancestry's computers to match not only DNA tests but also the family trees of its members, has really created a bounty of information for the interested researcher. When there is a DNA match for me or my brother Bob South to the person I am writing about, I will mention that, and I hope you agree with me that those matches make a nice endorsement of the paper trails I have been following for the last decade. I began to plan making a booklet or document with increased information on as many families as I could, but I think I will not only share the information when complete, but in segments as it comes along. Hence this blog. 

If you have comments, there is a place for them on this site, and anything you can add to the project will be appreciated. Our family tree, the C E South Family Tree, still exists on Ancestry, and many of you are guests on that tree. I must admit that I quit tending that tree in favor of a more personally focused tree some years ago. That means that I did not track down all the hints given for people on that tree, or search for more information on them. I would love for someone to take that tree on! I think in the near future at least one Webb descendant is going to link DNA to that tree, so there will be her matches' trees we can compare too.

However, you might want an invitation to the more focused South tree I have worked on in recent years, the South Pope Family Tree. Much of the information I will be sharing on this blog will be about people only on the South Pope tree. Just send me an email at popeda@gmail.com to request invitation to the South Pope Family Tree. Ancestry will send the invitation to the email you use to contact me. If you need help navigating an Ancestry tree, just email me. There is still a little teacher left in this old broad, so we can book some phone time to help you make sense of it. Most people seem to like the narrative or story information best, so that is my motivation for the blog and ultimately, a new document about our early families similar to the one I gave away at the South reunion a few years back.

Once I began adding early people to the tree, I decided to make a couple of fan charts showing nine generations of CE's ancestors and nine generations of Virginia Caroline's ancestors. .pdf charts can be printed (recommend using landscape setting) and viewed with a magnifying glass. Below are links to the most recent versions (2/22/2018).



Link to Virginia Caroline's Fan Chart  

I will have to make a new plan of attack, but I will get started on it!
Dana