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Primary Research

Some background information~~

It began with a high school project assigned to my daughter - just as it did with many others with whom I have corresponded - I sometimes wonder if those teachers who assign the family history projects know the results that reach far beyond the grade our children earned. As my daughter and I laid out the project, I realized just how little I really knew about my family and its history. I began to call my parents to get more details and soon became curious about the lives of my grandparents. While discussing this curiosity with my best friend Cindy, I was asked a simple question "have you typed in McLeod on the Internet to see what is there?" And thus the obsession was born.

My father, who had been a researcher in the past, was excited to learn that I had finally gotten the bug and soon traveled to Florida from South Carolina with boxes of his own research. I spent several weeks going through reams of paper, and putting all the information on a legal pad in chronological order according to each surname. I carried my basket full of papers and pencils and folders to soccer practices and games, to marching band and football games until it all began to make sense to me. Then, I built a simple five page website.

The original intent of the website was to enable my nieces and nephews to access the information for their own high school projects - but soon, I was getting emails from distant cousins with additional information, other family members were giving me their own boxes of research and the website began to grow. In the eight years since, the website has grown to over one hundred pages; I have discussed genealogy with hundreds of other researchers, spent hours in courthouses and hours in cemeteries lost deep in wooded areas that used to house members of my family; and become quite good at reading the results of DNA testing........ to borrow a phrase of my brother's "and now its come to this"!

Annual McLeod Family Reunion

What began as a reunion for the descendants of William Norman McLeod and Sarah Newman expanded into a reunion for the descendants of Jesse Lazarus McLeod.....in 2003, I became the genealogist for the Reunion Committee taking over from the retiring genealogist, Col. Purdy Belvin McLeod JR., and with the help of the original version of this website at geocities and the energy of my cousins, the small event is now all inclusive for the descendants of Angus and Nancy McCutchen MacLeod.

We meet the last Saturday in June of each year. For more information - please see our Reunion Page

The website has been online since January of 2000 - first at geocities and in 2003 both there and at Rootswebs Freepages - and has grown rapidly over the years. Beginning in late 2007 I realized that navigation was becoming more and more difficult - even I was getting lost in the site. And the files on my computer were a mess....to find images, I had to resort to the search function and I knew that something had to be done.

In November of 2008, I finally got down to business and came up with a new, hopefully, more clear navigation plan for the site and took advantage of more of the functions of Dreamweaver then I had previously. The biggest change to the site is that visitors will now find links to the Surnames on each page and navigation help for the largest two portions of the site and the easiest to get "lost" in - the DNA pages and the McLeod pages . Hopefully, if one gets lost while following links, it will be easier to get back to where you started and cause less frustration.

Repeat visitors to the site will now find that some pages are missing - not lost though because I've combined information on each family to as few pages as possible. Individual pages for any person for whom I had more information then just names and dates have been done away with for the most part - in most cases you will now find that information on the family page. Also in most cases, children will be found on the page which carries their surname....i.e. Nancy McLeod Hurst's children will be found only on the Hurst Family Page instead of on an individual page or on her parents page. The exceptions to this are where there is no information on the spouse's family (children will be found on the grandparents page) or where there is a great deal of information on the daughter and her family even if not for the spouse.

The Grave Index now has links to photo albums containing all the photographs taken at that site....please continue to contribute your photos......

I have done my best to use the same page names so that visitors bookmarks/favorites will still bring them to a particular page - but in most cases this wasn't possible....so remember to re-bookmark as you surf the site.

In addition, some information may have been left off of pages by mistake or I may have confused photos - please email me if you notice any thing of this type.....this has been a long job and I would be very surprised to find that I have not made some mistakes in the doing of it....

Comments, suggestions and corrections are always welcome~~~Email Me

The New Blog

Last year I began blogging about our old farmhouse and our life in what sometimes feels like a permanent construction zone .....out of that Blog blossomed a new one about genealogy (and a little political ranting).....I hope to Blog on a regular basis about the research - post birthdays of the living and those who now walk with us in another way, etc. ..once I get this website up and running..check it out in you're interested!

Why "Walking with ghosts~" for a title?

Any genealogist will tell you a ghost story or too if you allow them the time and opportunity to do so.....and I am certainly no exception to that rule. My husband and I have spent quite a few hours exploring the woods of Sumter and Kershaw Counties in South Carolina to find graveyards or spent time wandering around a church cemetery searching for just one more elusive relative's grave. And we have many times felt what feels like guidance from the ghosts of our family........I felt the title was appropriate!

Happy Researching

Lori McLeod Wilke

Reunion Page (Photo Album and The Tombstone Project)

Walking With Ghosts Home Page

Frequently Asked Questions

Mystery Photographs

Sideline Research

Family Tree DNA