Starting Over

I'm starting over. Not the Project, just the blog.  With over 25,000 page views, it has generated some attention over the last several years, but I thought it was time to rethink it.  The genealogies have come down for now; they needed to be updated anyway.  I'm sure they will return in the future, but everything is available in certain formats upon request.

Working in conjunction with our Facebook Group The Stafford Genealogical Project, I would like to begin presenting some of the information I have gathered over the last 30 years of climbing the Stafford family tree.  Right now, the documentation and stories and family group sheets amount to over 7000 pages held in 18 three-ring-binders, and who knows how many more digital pages that I have yet to print.  So I'd like to break it down and present it in smaller pieces for public consumption.

Two-thirds of my life have been dedicated to this project.  The story of my search can be found on another page of this blog, but I didn't start out with this end in mind.  I was mostly interested in my ancestry, and I set some goals for my search way back in 1988.  I wanted to find all of my ancestors back to the seventh generation--my great-great-great-great grandparents.  After that, I wanted to trace each line back to the immigrant ancestor.  Once the family got back to whatever Old Country they came from, I wasn't sure if I would pursue the search or not.  Since then, I have found all of my sixth generation ancestors, and all but four of my seventh generation ancestors.  Those remaining four may yet be found, but I have been looking for a long time.  Then I got married and doubled my search.  I'm missing twelve of my wife's seventh-generation ancestors.  And many of the lines I have traced out of the country, and some across the seas to Great Britain and Europe and even West Africa.  I believe I have a fairly comprehensive picture of who my ancestors were and where they came from.

In my search for the first American Stafford, I began finding collateral lines--uncles, cousins, distant relatives--and I started collecting them.  I don't know when the conscious decision was made to trace all the Staffords and their kin on this side of the ocean, but I made it and here we are today.  By the time we got enough proof that Richard Stafford was our first ancestor on these shores, I had already found seven of his children.  I mistakenly identified two others before discovering the two documents that identified all of his children--the Chancery Court papers filed in 1820 by my ancestor Joseph S. Stafford, and the original Bible records of Richard and Catharine Stafford, recorded by Richard himself.  Richard and Catharine had ten children, eight of whom lived to adulthood.  Out of those eight, I have traced descendants for five of them to the present day.  Three more family branches remain hidden in the historical records, out of sight for now.

From one man who landed on these shores 240 years ago this year, ten children were born.  From the five I have traced, over 10,000 direct descendants have been identified.  I am currently going through an outline of Richard's descendants, verifying line by line the biographical information for each individual.  It has taken three years, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through it.  I keep saying this will be my last time through, and then...

My lifelong dream has been to put the genealogy into book form.  Though a few branches have put together works of limited scope, I have devoted these many years to finding every descendant of our immigrant ancestor.  To my knowledge, no other genealogist has undertaken such a project; none had connected the various branches to each other before me; and most, if not all, of the online information regarding Richard Stafford and his descendants came from me.  That's not to say no one else knew where we came from, but if they did, they failed to publish it in any way whatsoever that I have ever found.

So my ultimate goal is publish the genealogy in a book, The Descendants of Richard & Catharine Brobeker Stafford, who settled in Hampshire County, Virginia, in 1785, or some such title.  Until then, keep looking for information here, and on Facebook, and at the Stafford Society if you care to join.

Thank you for involvement in The Stafford Genealogical Project.  I couldn't have done it without your help!