About This Site

This site is focused on the ancestry and history of specific families. Most of these families include ancestors who came to Ohio in the 17th or 18th century, so the history of these families is intertwined with the history of Ohio. That is why this wiki is associated with the public website Ohio Pioneers. Research on the families of this wiki sometimes leads to information that turns out to be unrelated to the families in this site or that's more broadly connected to the history of Ohio. Where appropriate, such information will be incorporated into the Ohio Pioneers website.

Not surprisingly, most of the families in this wiki also include known ancestors who never lived in what is now the state of Ohio, or ancestors who came to Ohio and then moved on (or back) to other places. If research on these people leads to information or ideas that might be of general interest, this website may come to include a public section for stories that are not about Ohio Pioneers but are connected by the often invisible lines of human migration and procreation.

This website also includes family information not likely to be of wide interest, but perhaps of keen interest to family groups. Such information is mostly kept in private member areas to keep the website from becoming overly complex and cluttered. In some cases, these private member areas are incomplete and informal in a way not appropriate for a public website – but that's OK and part of the nature of a collaborative wiki.

However, Some of the information it contains is not likely to be of wide interest, so parts of of the site available to members-only to allow the wiki to be incomplete and informal in a way not appropriate for a public website.

Finally, in many cases, the family histories presented in this site are heavily based on records and family trees found via websites such as Ancestry and FamilySearch. Caution must be exercised in using family trees found on such websites as as sources, since these are known to be subject to various kinds of errors. Thus somewhat greater weight has been given to sources such as county records (birth, marriage, death), census reports, gravestone inscriptions, and archival documents. On the other hand, family trees can include information passed down via oral history that cannot be known from any other source, and “official” records are not guaranteed to be completely accurate. So, please, do not treat this website as an authoritative resource!