I am a grandmother whose only hobby (besides grandchildren and granddaddy) has been genealogy for the past 25 plus years. As with most aspiring genealogists, I only wanted to learn about my direct lines, for my own pleasure and information. But I soon discovered that I needed to research the brothers and sisters and cousins to determine who was who.

With my family surnames of Veazey, Umstead, Critcher, Cozart, Waller, Peed, etc. in Granville County, this was a fairly easy task, much easier than researching Davis (which I have done back to 1795). On my Veazey line, I was particularly fortunate in that I grew up in Durham, North Carolina, about 10 miles from the "Veazey Ridge," and the Granville County courthouse did not burn. I found published materials from Cecil County, Maryland, but could not seem to fit my earliest North Carolina ancestor into those records. I told my husband that if only I could get to the Cecil County Courthouse, I thought I could figure this thing out.

I had always had this burning desire to write a "book" on my Veazey family. I already had a name picked out, "From the King to the King," because I could trace a chain of title of the Veazey land on the Veazey Ridge from the King of England to the King of the United States in 1942. My extended cousins came together in 1993 for the first Veazey Reunion and began sharing their research with me. As we worked to learn how we connected, I had to change the title, because all of the sudden, my project had grown by leaps and bounds!

Over the next two years, there was a mammoth amount of data entered into my family tree program and then the editing began. I removed hard spaces and hard returns, formatted with fonts, tabs, and indents. The periods behind each Roman numeral were hung on a right align tab setting that took about five keystrokes times 5,251 descendants! Many nights, Wayne had to chase me to bed about 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. The result was The Descendants of John Veazey.

As an only child, I feel really blessed with so many fine cousins scattered all over the world.