Genealogy is more than finding tombstones. It’s the door that we came through to get here and a window back to see where we came from. Tracing your family gives you a direct link to human history, cultural geography and the development of ideas. It’s neat stuff.

My progeny comprises a daughter, Jennifer Carrita, a paramedic in New Bedford, Massachusetts and a son, Alan W. Dove, a microbiologist/writer in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Oh, there’s an assortment of grandchildren and even a great-grandchild, too.

Sometime in the 1950s, my parents, Walter and Ina Dove, discovered that each had been saving the other’s letters for decades (my father travelled extensively for his scientific research). The box of those letters came to me upon my mother’s death and I gave them to Alan. He has been dutifully scanning, transcribing and publishing them in chronological order on a blog: Walter and Ina; A Story of Love, War and Science.

The letters begin in 1918, when my father was a 24-year-old second Lieutenant in the AEF, stationed at an aerodrome in eastern France near the Swiss border and writing home to his family. As I write this, they are engaged to be married (1925) and he is doing research in Florida while she lives on a ranch near Uvalde, Texas. It’s a fascinating read if you have any interest in science in the first half of the 20th century or want an intimate look at what life was really like in those times. Go to the archives to start reading at the beginning.

The Dove Family History is here. If you are looking for the surnames Dove, Lewis, Stampley, Bilbo, Shirley, Hines, Dunbar, Swayze or Fowler in Mississippi, South Carolina or Virginia, you may find some links to your own genealogy. There are lots of others in the 1000+ entries. Several lines go back to ca. 1700 in America, England, Wales, France and Switzerland and at least one leads back to Medieval Europe.

Please contact me if you have questions or any information to exchange. We can dig up dirt together.