The four genealogists working for the Welles Family Association were:
1) Lela Sampson, 1890-1964
2) Chester Wells, 1907-1970
3) Donna Siemiatkoski, 1946-2001
4) Barbara Mathews, 1949-[some time in the future -- 2049 has a great ring to it!]
The family association papers actually include in one way or another the work of all four of us. In addition, several cousins have published very useful works on their own wedges down from the Governor. I am in the great position of having copies of their books to use, but we don't include their work in our association files.
When I talk about the book manuscript, I'm being a bit too fast and easy in my wording. The boxes in the blog photo cover only the first to sixth generations of the current book draft. The full set of family association manuscripts has more elements than that.
As you can imagine, there are copyright issues when the work of so many people is involved. For that reason and because we want to ensure that the compilation of data remains available to future family historians, when these boxes all go to the Connecticut Historical Society, I will have them organized under the aegis of the family association as a whole. They will include:
1) Applications to the family association from 1936 to 1988 and some since then. Photocopies actually.
2) Genealogy work of Chester Wells. [Chester is quite clear in his books that he started with the work of Lela Sampson and filled in stuff using Stiles. If I could find Lela's work before it went to Chester, I'd include her work as a separate category.] This consists of photocopies of the five volumes of his typescript. At this time, Chester's work exists in only two extant copies (although we were told there was a third copy in his possession, we have no idea where it is today). One copy is bound and in the open stacks at the Connecticut State Library. The other copy is in the possession of the family association Registrar. Her copy is updated and has pages inserted. I have a photocopy of that updated copy.
2) Genealogy work of Donna Holt Siemiatkoski. This consists of the research notes she kept, which are all made on family group sheets. She kept them in the same order that you would see if you printed out an indented descendants chart. That worked very well for her as she researched multiple generations at a time along the same line. We should keep Donna's material in the order she organized it, but we might need to index it so that records are more easily found.
Donna's files also include two manuscripts. The first is the last marked-up copy of the manuscript that was later published as a four-generation study in 1990. The other one is the printout of the six-generation book that she gave me about two weeks before her death. It is fantastic to have such good snapshots of her work preserved.
3) Genealogy work of Barbara Mathews. This consists of family folders for each household in the future six-generation study. Each family folder includes notes written by me, by Nancy Pexa, and often by others as well. If you were to look in a folder, you would see the family structure develop as a dialogue between Nancy and me.
4) Correspondence. These four boxes include letters to and from Welles genealogists about families in the upcoming book. Some of the files include important information about descendants in generations beyond those published. Others include photocopies of documents not easily found elsewhere, like family Bible records. In some cases, the cousins who published books may have included them in our correspondence, which will be a great bonus for future researchers.
Right now, that's how it all is organized. I'm open to suggestions.
Yours, Barbara
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