This family history stuff is hard work.  And it can be frustrating, too.  I can see how people can spend years tracing their family tree because the reach is so large and there are branches all over the place.  If it were not for the work of others who have already gone down this path and left their findings where people like me can find it, there would be no hope for putting together anything close to what I think we have here.  I can't prove much of this, though, so I am taking it for granted that these other people know what they are talking about.    

Anyway, quite a bit of new information about our West family ancestors has surfaced over the past few weeks.  I may have mentioned before, that after a lot of relatively fruitless searching for wayward Wests I had stumbled upon a West-Cherry family tree web site where a number of names, dates, and places were identical to some of those in our own tree.  This new-found tree stuff, though reached back much further in time than we had been able to do with our own family tree.  

Fortunately, I was able to contact the gentleman who had constructed that family web site and he was kind enough to point me to new sources of information, where I have found enough data to make me believe that we can now trace our ties to several additional family lines, who by fortune (or misfortune, as the case may be) were disposed to marry into the West family line at some point in the past.   So now, besides the West-McElroy and Cherry-Sanders lines, we can also blame our faulty genes on the Fraziers, Johnsons, Darbys, Gores, and Breazeals, to name a few.

In fact, there is enough information (if not blame) now available to make some sort of attempt to put together a few family genealogy pages.  So, with that in mind you will find here a new West Family Genealogy page (or two) to browse, if you wish.  The two primary family lines that we have attempted to trace are, of course the Wests, and the Cherrys (Grandpa D.L. West's mother's family).  There is also more information about how and where this new family data mentioned above came from.   And, there is a "timeline" sort-of-family-tree-thing that attempts to show graphically how these new (old) folk are related to us (and each other).  I call it the Family Ties page.

So please take a look and, as always, let me know if you see any obvious mistakes and I will attempt to correct them as soon as possible.  Thanks,  JWS.  q