Book Description

This is a family history story that begins with Priscilla A. H. Wilson & Charles W. Ross, 3rd, my mother and father, and continues back to those souls who came before them. Their ancestors on both sides are bound up and intertwined in the history of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Maryland. These families include the Ross, Kunkel, MacGill, McElfresh, Johnson, Ringgold, Murdock, Potts, Shriver, Brengle, Mantz, Hammond, Burkhartt, Griffith, Worthington, Riggs, Maccubbin, Warfield, Dorsey, Pottinger, Lee, Brooke, Corbin, Hilleary, and Howard ancestrial lines on my father's side. On my mother's side are the families of Wilson, Ham, Cole, Tibbetts, Hawkes, Downes, Bickford, Bucklin, Davis, Hopkins, Luther, Smith, Salisbury, Tucker, Meserve [Meservy], Heard [Hurd], Canney, Stone, Ricker, Meader, Follett and Twombly [Twombley]. This family history is divided into three volumes. Volume one is devoted to the Ross families, volume two tells the stories of Theresa Kunkel and her ancestors and volume three describes the histories of Priscilla A. H. Wilson and her ancestors. Every life is important and worth our attention no matter how briefly or how long it was lived. In researching this history of the family, I found there are some family members where there is extensive information, facts and interesting insights about their personality and character. Other souls, however, my research found just scant data save for a birth and death date. In other cases, we could use a marriage date plus the dates of births and passing of children to provide a glimpse into what life was like for that ancestor. Another point I used to enhance the stories of these people is to research about what was happening in the world at that time. This background information usually gives a further insight into a person's life. Any scrap of personal information or anticdote expands a life story and gives us a flavor of who that person was and what they were like when they lived. For the sake of privacy, these books do not to provide the detailed stories of any person who is living at the time of this publication. There are always going to be researchers at work and finding new sources of information and detail. Thus, the life stories of our ancestors will never really be complete and finished. This publication is but a snapshot of what is known at this point in time. There will always be another document that will be discovered tomorrow, next month or in a succeeding year that may provide more compete information about someone in our past that was just a birth and death date before the discovery. For this reason the reader will find blank pages for notes throughout these three volumes. It is our hope that anyone having more information will contact the authors and allow that information to be included in the next edition.