After his retirement (which was in 1986), my grandfather wrote this preface to the genealogical research he did on his own family.

While waiting for Sunday dinner in the home of the Hong family of Oo-nam Myun Imsil County, North Chulla Province, Republic of Korea, we saw a tall stack of books in the corner. The father of our host, an elderly gentleman, answered our question about them by showing us that they were the records of his family going back for over a thousand years. Mr. Hong said that every thirty years, those with his surname gathered and updated this registry. They planned at their next meeting to send a printed record with names and photographs of all the Hong clan members to the national libraries of every nation on earth, so that in future generations their descendants who migrated to those countries could trace their family ancestry.

Unfortunately no such system has been in existence for most Western families, including our own. I never knew my two grandfathers who died long before I was born, and my grandmothers died when I was very young so that I have only the dimmest memories of them. An attempt to trace our antecedents more than a couple of centuries would now be difficult, if not impossible. In our case, interest would center in the family tree of my father (the Hoppers of Kentucky) and my mother (the Barrons of South Carolina), and for Dot that of her father (the Longeneckers of Pennsylvania) and her mother (the Hauharts of Missouri). This would result in a blend for our own children of blood from England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and Switzerland… so far as we know.

One common factor in all of these is that they were strong Christians (at least in recent generations and perhaps before that) and represent Presbyterian, Methodist, and Mennonite backgrounds. Another common feature is that all our ancestors of two generations ago (that of our grandparents) were farmers, living in rural areas, who during their lifetime moved to urban areas. All of them were hard-working, decent, respected members of their communities. There is no record of any “black sheep” nor of any who failed in their family, community, and church relationships.