My dad had a lot of brothers and sisters, so until I was about 15 years old, I never new anyone named Boone, that wasn't directly related to me ! Then a new Boone family moved into our neighborhood that none of my relatives knew, and I first became aware that I wanted to know more of my family history than my grandmother could tell me; to know more about who I was related to, and where we came from, than was written in my mother's Bible.

We all generally believe that we share common immigrant ancestors with those who share our family name. We accept the likelyhood that we are not all related to the same immigrant ancestors. One of my earliest discoveries was that we don't always agree on what the family name really is. I discovered in the 1850 census, enumerated ironically in Northampton County by one Nicholas Boone, that the name I had always known, didn't have an "e" at the end until that document. Every prior document -- census or local civil document -- list these same people as BOON, without the "e". Later research exposed me to the SOUNDEX system, and the reason we search for B-500 instead of Boon, Bone, Boone, Bohn, Bohun, Bown, or a dozen variant spellings, the whim of the person holding the pen at that moment in time.

The challenge,then, is to locate and prove the correct relationships in an environment often cluttered with legends, barren of factual documentation, and complicated by 9-generations of migratory inter-mingling. Much of the documentation available today, and many family legends, are based on a purported physical proximity, some point in time, to one or more of the landmarks associated with the famous pioneer Daniel Boone . . . and thus they presume an ancestral relationships.

I was most fortunate to avoid many of the pitfalls in that my Boone family pre-dated the North Carolina migration of Daniel's parents; that several indiviuals in each generation chose to remain on or near the original colonial land patents; and that I still live within 60-miles of all the landmarks of their collective lives.

It was unfortunate that much of the documentation for the early colonial period -- if it ever existed, in those first 100-years -- has been destroyed, either by accidental fires in this temporate region or the historical events themselves-- wars, hurricanes and such. It was somewhat unfortunate that the family spirit was so strong that, generation-after-generation, brothers named their sons for beloved ancestors, so that where records do exist, it is often impossible to tell which Nicholas, or Joseph, or Thomas is being described. From available census information we can discern that generations since 1790 were also prolific, producing an average of 11 children each, distributing any original Bibles or other family papers among thousands of descendants, to be lost or forgotten by many of them, in the migration across America.

A significant portion of my 18-year research effort has been spent trying to prove connections between those individuals I know I'm related to, by existing family documents or distinctive civil records, and other individuals with similar names, in close geographic proximity. The only way I know to do that is to collect every fragment of fact I can find, and to catalog and correlate these facts to infer new meaning from them. This section will try to relate what I have found, in the structure that seems most appropriate.