It's been a very long time since I've posted. I've been busy lately with the marriage of my oldest daughter and a trip to Alaska. Things are settling down now and I thought I'd share a discovery with you. A cache of letters has been found dated between 1980 and 1982 from Margaret Fife to my father Thomas Ewing. The significance of these letters is that they document her journey of thought in researching our family's arrival into Georgia. They also document my fater's contribution to the Georgia part of her book. You've all seen me write of Margaret with fondness and high regard for the incredible research she performed without the benefit of the internet. She invested tremendous time and huge sums of money going to archives, courthouses, libraries, and other sources in the states and abroad. These letters are a testament to her amazing diligence, and very specifically detail her wrestling over whether we came from the Cecil County MD Ewings or those from Cumberland County PA. She finally settled on the latter when she was so close to settling on the former. If only Y-DNA testing had been common then. But if it had, then all this would have been so easy we might have missed all the history behind the lives of my ancestors and not appreciate the value of who they were and how they lived. I'm still studying these documents (which includes numerous primary source documents), there might be some clues therein to the missing years between Cecil County and Georgia. After I'm done, I'll scan the originals and publish them on ewingsofgwinnett.org. The originals will eventually go to the Ewing repository in a file named for me and my father at the Allen County Library in Fort Wayne Indiana. Copies will also be sent to the Cecil County Historical Society, Gwinnett County Historical Society, and the Odem Library in Moultrie GA.
Keep up the excellent Ewing Research work!!