Welcome to the Colonial Roots.Net Blog.

I’ve created this site as a way to cross-reference history and genealogy, with maps and time-lines but haven’t yet found the time to bring together the all the elements I want to see here.

For now the blog is a central focus here. I’m finding this to be an exciting time where online Genealogy is moving forward so quickly that I think it merits some discussion. Other blogs are doing a good job of keeping up with the rapid changes and additions of databases but often do little more than rehash press releases.I’d like to explore a little more of tools available to us and to discuss how genealogy is changing as an industry.

I want this to grow into a place to add context to my research via maps and timelines, and to link public domain content to expand my picture of the areas and families I am researching. I think this could grow to much more than that, but for now the tools available to me are rapidly changing and I haven’t really gotten past starting to build a framework for this project yet.

I want to share my passion for history coming alive with stories of the people who adventured to new worlds, explored and built towns, roads, and cities that became the world as we know it today.

My own focus is on a blend of genealogy, history, timelines and maps related to Colonial America and the 17th through 19th centuries. I’m interested in early colonies in the Americas, maps, colonial commerce and trading, and in understanding the political and religious contexts that defined the eras when my ancestors migrated.

This grows out of my own interest in genealogy research which is rooted largely in early Pennsylvania families that arrived in the America but is also intended to include far more than that.

Personally I’m quite interested in Colonial Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Jamaica, and Barbados, New York and the colonies that p0receded that in the British West Indies. I’m particularly interested in mapping migrations from Scotland, Ireland, England, Holland, France and Germany and how those migrations continued in America.

My research interest is in understanding the context of the times my ancestors lived in leads me to look at a broad range of history, where people came from and why, and to explore what the world was like in Colonial America, and in the places these settlers came from and left behind.With ancestry rooted in Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales, France, Germany and Holland I’m also interested in those areas in the 17th and 18th century.

I’m particularly interested in old maps, migrations paths over generations, early American Indian trading and conflicts, and in understanding the history and context of communities that evolved around early settlements.

The main blog will include posts about areas of research and notes on a day to day basis as I explore and collect information.

I hope to see my ColonialRoots wiki become a database of people, places and events linked to historical accounts and info in the public domain. Through this I hope to create a resource that can can hep me and others better understand the context of Colonial American times from the 17th to 19th Century.

The photo at the top of the site features my grandfather’s sister, Dorothy Dill, circa 1900.