Editor’s Note. In 1970 my mother Mary Gwinn Bowe published 500 copies of The Families, her book of family stories and genealogy. It was the result of years of research and writing. This was of course in the era where finding out the births, doings, relationships and deaths of ancestors was not facilitated by the internet.
My mother’s Trinity College roommate and later sister-in-law, Julia Lecour Bowe, had previously written a history of her French ancestors in America called The Generations. This had inspired my mother to take on a similar task in looking into not only her own Gwinn, Roche, Irwin, Tack, Cosgrave and other English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish relatives, but also the stories of other families related by marriage if not by blood. These latter families included the Canavans, Bowes, Caseys, Ribouds, Thompsons and Lecours among others.
When I thought about carrying on the tradition of pulling together family memories and histories using the tools developed in the half century since my mother’s work was published, I thought it was fitting to look back on mother’s work as Volume 1 of a continued and expanded set of family sagas. Hence the name of this website, The Families: Vol. 2, honors and gives recognition and tribute to my mother’s earlier labors.
Not surprisingly you’ll find that some of the family anecdotes and stories my mother recorded in The Families are republished here. And why not? A good story is always a good story and a good family story is even better. As you look around this archive of pictures, films and videos, documents, oral histories and family trees, you might find a look at The Families an interesting visit with the kin my mother chronicled a half century ago.
Just click on the picture of this tome above and you’ll be taken to the Table of Contents of The Families. That will let you jump around to what interests you.
