Me. Robert W Butler Jr. trying to get Sally's new toy to talk to Sally's old toy. Mac : The official computer of the Butlers of Brockton team.
The Elva Letters were written by Elva May Butler, Granddaughter of Alton Webster Butler. They tell of her upbringing in Brockton in the early 1800s. A good glimpse of that time.
After my father Robert Butler Sr. retired, he took a strong interest in genealogy. He did it old school, talking to the old generation, visiting libraries and taking dates off gravestones. He did reasonably well. A good deal of the work presented here is his. In general, if in the Butlers of Brockton web site proper, there is no source on how we came up with a piece of information, it usually came from Dad. Recently, his daughter Sally and I picked up his work. We are using MacFamily Tree software to record what we have found, and are gathering pictures and stories to be included in the data base.
I am also discovering internet age genealogy. I've joined ancestry.com. With dad's information as a seed, no knowledge of genealogy but a solid background in computers, I've been able to add lots of names to the family tree. These days there is a lot of family information available on line. Using traditional methods and years of work, dad got the family line back to where the inhabitants of Hingham England were moving to Hingham, Massachusetts. In about a month, given luck and someone else's efforts, I found an ancestor crossing the English Channel from France to England with William the Conquerer.
MacFamily Tree is a great data base program. It even automatically generates web pages that allows one to share all this information. The Butlers of Brockton proper is just that, a computer generated mass of information.
Note the navigation bar at the top of this and every other page on the site.
The above fan chart naturally places myself at the center of everything. The next ring out shows my parents, the next my grandparents, and so forth. Things are reasonably complete out to the great great grandparents. Beyond that, some families are easier to trace than others, and the print gets too small to reasonably read.
The Modern Butlers and Modern Roses links are for people interested in living or recently living relatives. These cover the descendants of my two pairs of grandparents.
There are also seven pages dedicated to the ancestors of a few individuals who have lots of known ancestors that can be traced well into the past. Four of these ancestors have had families that have been to a great degree local since colonial times: Royal Hollis, Sarah Sumner Hayden, Sarah R Austin, and James Webster Butler. While the links on the above fan chart are labeled for local towns, this exaggerates just how local these trees are.
Three other pages are not focused locally at all. Marcy Comfort Lang's family came from the Hampton, New Hampshire region, and before that from England. Marie Bouvier's people came first from Canada, mostly from Quebec, and prior to that from France. Anton Sevrin Fredriksen was born in Norway before coming to Gloucester, Massachusetts.
But the computer generated web pages don't give a broad overview of the family history. These introductory pages are intended go give enough background on the Butler and Rose families that one might be able to make sense of the more detailed but generically organized computer generated pages.
(Continued below the fan diagram. Check out the fan diagram.)
Aside from the Butler / Rose focus of most of the tree, there are a few special folk -- Robert DeBelleme and Abraham Lincoln -- that are given some extra attention in the form of their own pages. I have also added a Mayflower page, as we have a bunch of Mayflower passengers on the tree, though only four of them are direct ancestors. (Only four, he says with a snicker.)
Again, this is an overview. This is intended to give a high level picture of how the full tree flows. The Butlers of Brockton web pages proper go into far more detail, with pictures for the more recent members of the tree. While everyone on the above fan chart is my direct ancestor, The Butlers of Brockton site proper goes off to chase assorted diversions.
Scroll right for more pictures.
