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About the Author of This Site

I am Allan C. "Ace" Edmands, and I have created this site as a history of my family. Throughout the pages in this site, the occasional use of the first person singular pronouns "I," "my," "mine," and "me" refer to me, unless the pronoun is used in a context where someone else is indicated, as in an article written by someone else, with the author clearly identified in a byline.

I have received invaluable help in creating the Web site from the reviewers of its interface and content. I especially want to acknowledge the help of certain kin: Christine Barrett, Wendy Pearson, and Max Edmands.

This is a family history site, documenting not only vital statistics about our ancestors but stories, traditions, and legends about them. It is not a genealogical site.

As a genealogist, I am no more than an amateur. Although I have visited a few graveyards pertinent to my family, I have never rubbed a tombstone. Although I have interviewed several family members, I have not been systematic about it. I freely confess that almost every bit of content on this site has come to me second hand, and I have as yet done no independent validation of the material given to me.

Maybe I'm not yet even an amateur genealogist; maybe I'm a mere compiler and collater. I realize that I will have no claim to the title genealogist until (God willing!) I have lived long enough to scrutinize against primary sources all that material.

But so much material!

My mother's father created his own family history, which we have named the Milkcan Papers (and which he called Our Family, by One of Us); then he died, leaving the bulk of it hidden away in a milkcan.

Independently, of course, my father's mother, seeking membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, gathered extensive documentation of the ancestors on that side; she died, too, leaving piles of paper behind.

My mother diligently typed and retyped the material from her father and from her mother-in-law, and she gathered a bunch of material on her own, too; then she died as well, leaving notebooks and boxes of paper for others to go through.

My wife's maternal grandfather accumulated three centuries of vital statistics of his ancestors; he died, of course, leaving behind many papers.

My former wife's mother gave me piles of letters and documents that documented her family history, and she wrote down lively memorials of her parents and grandparents; she has passed away, leaving all this behind for somebody to organize and make coherent.

My older children have several hundred recorded direct ancestors, and my youngest, by my second marriage, has over a thousand. And if I die before pulling all of this together, they-- or their descendants-- will have a horrible mess to go through. So, on the eve of my sixtieth birthday, I am launching this Web site as a work in progress, with obsessive plans to get all those recorded ancestors, as well as the known ancestors and descendants of inlaws and cousins, documented within a couple of years.

Or maybe longer: Letting the site remain a work in progress might keep interested kin praying for my continued good health.

Here is a picture of me before I began the project to put all this content into a Web site. (Click the picture to enlarge it.)

Here is a picture of me after I had begun to pull all this together. (Click the picture to enlarge it.)

I've been interested in my family tree since I was a child. Well before the Milkcan Papers were discovered, my grandfather had shared the names, dates, and other vital statistics of his ancestors with his relatives. My mother had typed down all this data, as well as what she had received from her mother-in-law. At about the age of ten, I knew I had ancestors, going back three centuries, with very intriguing names: Peleg Lawrence, Prudence Draper, Eliony Lumber, Unity Fales, Hezekiah Hawes, Freelove Fisk, Ephraim Mansfield, and Artemas Seymour Edmands. Always fascinated with maps and diagrams, I charted all the information I could.

For two decades after the discovery of the Milkcan Papers, I had other preoccupations, but following the death of my baby daughter Maja in 1987, my interest in family history reignited. I drew out a thirty-foot-long scroll, a genealogical chart, listing all the known ancestors of my children. And I began typing on a primitive desktop computer, creating both a book with a crude text-processing program called DWScript and an online version with an even cruder hypertext precursor to HTML.

Entrepreneurial adventures and a 5-year business assignment in Japan interrupted this effort-- and probably all for the good. Computers were so much handier when we returned to the States at the end of 1999, and now there was the World Wide Web. With our new desktop computer came a cute little genealogical program: Easy Family Tree from GENERATIONS® (trademark of Sierra On-Line, Inc.), and I quickly put over 2,000 names in it-- all the names I had accumulated from all those papers and from quickie interviews with kin close at hand.

Shortly after the death of my stepfather in 2000, I began working on this site. I'm not only transferring what's on Easy Family Tree to the Web-- pretty much dry vital stats-- but I'm designing an interface that enables me to relay stories that I've found fascinating, link to the history that was going on in the world when an ancestor had reached a certain age, and create interesting lists: who was in which war, who belonged to which generation, which cousins married each other, and who immigrated when and from where.

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About Fair Use

Fair use notice:

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This is especially true in the windows documenting the historical perspective, where there are numerous extensive quotations from sources that are fully cited.

I make such material available in an effort to advance awareness and understanding of the historical perspective around our ancestors' lives. I believe this constitutes a "fair use" of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 (Chapter 1), U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond "fair use," you must obtain permission directly from the copyright owner.