I have been interested in writing, geography and history
since I was in high school. Some thirty years ago one of my sisters mailed
some group sheets to me to fill out. After that I was hooked on
genealogy.
I couldn't help but know that my Kelly ancestors came from
Ireland because my parents and grandparents rarely stopped talking about it.
Besides Irish I guess I knew that some ancestor must have come from someplace other
than Ireland, and after some research I learned that one gggrandfather
Jessie Richardson came from Iceland to Virginia where he moved his
parishioners through North Carolina to settle in 1822 in Georgia.
In communicating with my grandparents I learned that
grandmother Kelly's father was an Owen and her mother was a Rutledge and
both were born in Tennessee. On the maternal side my grandma married a
Pruitt from Texas, but she was from Missouri. Her father was a Beebe from
Missouri and her mother was a Williamson from DesMoines County, Iowa.
In 1995 I got on the internet and started searching to
discover out where all of them came from before their grandparents arrived
in America. I got a lot of clues, but no proof until three years ago when
two cousins contacted me with the news that they had been looking for
me.
There was a period of searching for where the Rutledges
came from...we knew they were in Virginia before Tennessee, but what country
did they come from? Finally a cousin who was born in Mayo, but lived in
London told us that all Rutledges in the world came from near Bewcastle,
Scotland and many were removed from the border area by the English to
Ulster, Ireland and some to Mayo, Ireland. The fact that gggfather Rutledge
founded the town of Tyrone in Missouri suggested that his grandfather might
have come from Ulster.
Why they were transported from Scotland to Ireland led to
discoveries that Scotland was practically totally occupied by Anglo-Saxon,
Norman and Viking peoples. Then for some reason my parents made a big deal
of being Celts, then by coincidence I discovered both Irish and Celts in
Scotland. Why am I not surprised?
It was history, geography, and genealogy, archeology
and genealogy, all of the things I like to do, needing only research and
writing to make some sense of it all. These short Fun histories are the
result of that research and interest. Of course, Vikings, Celts and Normans
all led me to Europe, and it just happens that they all basically came from
the place in Europe. Makes me crazy.
That information turned me around to look at European history in an
effort to learn where they came from to Ireland and Scotland; and the
societies they probably originated from.
That research evolved into several places they came from,
including Spain, Denmark and the vast area spanning the area of Germany to
France including Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, all shown on
the Map
of Europe
The accumulation of research kept piling up and up into
gard copy files with
no way to use or make sense of what I found, my instinct to write took over, and
these Fun Histories are the result. I hope visitors enjoy reading them half
as much as I enjoyed writing them.
