People start researching their family history for a number of reasons including wanting to discover where their family originated from or to find out about a particular member of their family.
Vince had always wanted to know about his grandfather, about whom his father could tell him almost nothing.
When I was about thirteen, my mother quietly told me that my father had been married before he had met her, that it had been one of those war time marriages when they were both very young and which, like so many, should never have happened. The marriage had produced a daughter who had been adopted.
The tree begins with Wright Barnes and his wife Sarah. Wright was born in 1794 in North Carolina and died in Arkansas in 1857.
From Wright and Sarah there descended six generations, four of which are shown on the tree, which covers two hundred years of the family’s history.
The Barnes family were pioneers and settlers, people prepared to face challenges and risks in pursuit of their dream of a better life and better land.
Wright seems to have suffered from wanderlust and an unwillingness to settle in one place but many of his son Roderick’s descendants have remained settled, living and farming in Tennessee, in the bordering counties of Hardeman, McNairy and Chester.
The earliest ancestor of Clarence Monroe Barnes that we can trace with certainty is Wright Barnes.
He was born c1794, in North Carolina. He was an early settler, a farmer.
By 1830 he and his family were in Lawrence County, Alabama and by 1837 he owned land in Hardin County, Tennessee.
Although Roderick married Amanda Keith in Lincoln, Tennessee in 1846, at the time of the 1850 census he and his family were living in Tippah, Mississippi.
By 1860 they had moved to Hardeman County, Tennessee.
