Welcome to An American Family. This site tells the story of two American families: the Jones family (my family) and the Dumond family (my husband’s family). Our families come from two very different places and backgrounds. My ancestors were probably all from the British Empire and settled in the southern United States well before the Civil War. My husband is French-Canadian and Acadian, and his ancestors came to the New World in the 1600s. They settled in Maine, and generations seemed to have alternated between the US and Canada. But we are all more “American” than anything else. Hence, An American Family. On this site, you will find family trees, photo albums, and biographical sketches/memoirs written by members of our family.
I started working on “my genealogy” in 1999, concurrent with the launch of Family Search on the web. My uncle, Michael Fitzpatrick, had launched a Fitzpatrick genealogy site which I checked out with my father, Walter Singleman Jones, during a visit home in the summer of 1999. That very day I read about the launch of FamilySearch.org, so Dad and I checked it out. We found his grandfather, Jesse Augustus Reid, easily, and Dad wanted to know how hard it would be for me to create a site like Uncle Mike’s. I told him that first I’d have to do the research and the hunt for my ancestry had begun.
The surnames and locations in my lines are:
- Alley – Ohio and West Virginia
- Boutwell – Mississippi
- Boyd – Mississippi
- Bruce – Ohio and West Virginia
- Chandler – West Virginia
- Dunaway – Mississippi
- Elliott – Virginia
- Estep – probably Ohio or West Virginia
- Greer – Scotland, Maryland, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi
- Hampton – North Carolina and Tennessee
- Howell – Mississippi
- Jones – Mississippi and Louisiana
- Laws – probably North Carolina
- Linkins – probably Ohio
- Lowe – Virginia and North Carolina
- Puckett – Kentucky
- Reid – Mississippi
- Riley – West Virginia
- Smith – West Virginia
- Taylor – Maryland
- Wellman – West Virginia
- Williams – Mississippi
- Wilson – West Virginia
- Wilson (probable separate line) – probably Virginia
My husband’s family came from France to Canada and New Brunswick to Maine.
The surnames in my husband’s lines are:
- Bellanger
- Blanchette
- Dubois
- Dumond/Dumont
- Levesque
- Lizotte
- Ouellette
- Sirois
- Theriault
- Thibodeau
- Violet/Violette