This family history is a story with several threads, but it starts with the family stories that brothers Jack and Gene Taylor heard while growing up on a farm in Marion County Missouri. Then in the early 1950’s both brothers began to systematically research their family roots to add to the stories they heard from their parents and large extended family. Over the years my father Gene shared his research with me and Jack did the same with his daughter, Kay Taylor Long.
In 2004 Kay took the work that Gene had compiled and transcribed it into Family Tree Maker, a genealogy program; she added her mother’s Kneer family as well and included some of her own memories of individual family stories. The result was a file of about 2000 Taylor ancestors and over 200 pages of detailed notes on the Taylor family history
In 1995 I helped my father move from Prescott, Arizona to Atlanta, and then one more time in 2003 to a small independent living apartment near us. This allowed me to help identify important papers, family letters, notebooks and photographs to be saved for future research.
“Are We Related to Anybody Famous?”
Matthew’s son, Cooper Taylor, posed this question to me in 2016 when he was ten. I asked “What do you mean by “famous”? He responded: “Prominent or well known.” I could have simply answered, “Your father, Matthew Taylor, was on the Olympic White Water team that competed in Sydney in 2000 and in Athens in 2004.”
However, I decided that this was an opportunity to share some interesting family stories that my father and others have passed on to me. I saw continuing his project as a way to honor him and preserve the history he discovered. The short answer to Cooper’s question is, “Yes, we are related to some persons who were prominent in their time and place, but maybe not famous enough to be remembered today.”
Shining-Rock Blog Taylor Family Stories
Following my father’s death in early 2006 my youngest son Matthew and I discussed a family history website. In June 2007 Matthew started a family blog with the following introduction (with a few updates by me):
“Our Taylors and related families in the USA are dutifully noted back to before the Revolutionary War. In many instances the trail back to their European roots is unclear. Most all of our immigrants came in the 1600’s and 1700’s from England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, and The Netherlands.
As with good genealogies, the chronologies and lineages are but part of the story: the actual biographies, told through text, maps and pictures, yield a fascinating and rich arc, sometimes with meaning and sometimes not, hinting at the mythic family tree. That’s what we are going for, an emerging picture of which we are — twisted limbs, gnarled burls, scarred bark and all.”
“Love Letters over the Pacific — World War II Correspondence of Jo and Gene Taylor of Nashville, TN”
The first part of my father’s family history treasure trove included 460 letters between my parents during World War II. I finished reading these in 2009 and was struck by how vividly the letters revealed their personalities and characters.
I thought our children and grandchildren would want to read the letters and get to know my parents in that special time. In 2010 I started a project to have the letters transcribed. This and the editing process took about four and a half years. In June 2015 the book of letters was published.