Thanks to searches at dot com
... and all other sources of the past.
Grandfather’s name was the single thing that set me on this quest,
And the information highway soon brought that search to rest.
McGagie was a misspelled deed done by a census man.
And probably an Irish one, a Mc or Mac type fan.
My father’s dad’s real name was writ Micajah, that is true,
Discovery of that simple fact came to me from the blue.
Now I’m obsessed and I must go wherever I am led,
And beckoning me onward, are whispers of the dead.
Nancy Dollar’s unsolved as yet, her parents lost in time,
And William Freeman disappeared while still within his prime.
From whence, pray tell, did James Gray come, a colonel brave and true,
And was Sir William Morgan, a noble, through and through?
From Ulster’s northern Irish coast and King Arthur’s Camelot,
The land of William Wallace, doomed bravehearted Scot,
Came Bennett, Taylor, Graham, and Diggs, Freeman, Ghent, and Floyd,
Ferguson and Ratliff, Morgan and McCoy.
Chiliquinga represent the Salasacan tribe,
Who paid the price of conquest that sprang from Inca pride.
Boone and Yarbrough came as well, Pierpont, Lymbier, Ridgeway,
Dulaney, Black, and Engelfield, Robinson, and Gray.
MacFarland waited long to come, but finally arrived,
And yelled “Loch Sloy” to celebrate that they had all survived.
Many died while giving birth, disease was rampant too,
Smallpox, gangrene, diptheria, the measles and the flu.
Malaria and murder just added to the grief,
Six wars and tribal skirmishes provided no relief.
Each and every man who came endured untold travail,
Each and every woman defied that she was frail.
Still they rode and walked and sailed to claim their piece of earth,
And most forever lost their ties with countries of their birth.
And here I’m left, the product, of all that human toil,
With debt unpaid to ancestors who’ve melded with the soil.
Retelling their history seems the least that I can do,
Restoring life to names long gone, remembered by a few.
So, I’ll prowl every web site for treasures I might find,
The family’s out there waiting – conveniently on-line.