Her Book

Joyce's Foreword To Her Children

These pages of family history are my attempt to generate an interest for you to learn about your ancestors and to gain an appreciation from where you came. It can never be handed on to future generations unless the present ones know.

I wanted to see that you each have a copy so that there will be no danger of losing all this wonderful information because of there being only one copy and for some reason it be destroyed.

I realize a lot of names and numbers can be very boring and a person can tend to get bogged down with them. I have so much more information and stories that I won't even attempt to include. I will stick mostly to our direct family lines and if anyone is interested in more you can research it from my many volumes of records and pictures. (I hope one of you will be interested enough to preserve it all after I am gone).

Most of you know about the legal-sized computer printout sheets that date us back to the year 217 A.D. and King Bewar of Norway. You will have copies of those names if you don't already and the famous people to whom we are supposed to be connected. There is some information that I have gathered from books and encyclopedias, but most of it has just been there for me to sift through.

I haven't spent a lot of time researching libraries, cemeteries, etc. There seems to be an abundance of information and not much danger of there being an "end of the line" in future generations, due to the fact that there were so many large families of ten and more children in nearly every family line.

(You might be interested to know that as famous as Abraham Lincoln was that there is no one left of his line to brag about their famous ancestor). I also have two friends who have no interest in their past because there was no one for them to pass the information on to. I find that rather sad.

So I think it is nice and we should be proud to have something like this to talk about. I am sure if I would have known more about our family history when I was a young girl in school, I would have been more interested in my history lessons. Maybe it would spark an interest for the younger ones in school today. If they knew that during all the things that happened in America from the first Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock down through the history books, they probably had a relative taking part in something at one place or another.

Our connection to the long line of ancestors to the third century was by a sweet looking lady, but by all accounts was illiterate. I was told she signed her name with an "x". She is Jane Ayers who married Barton Stone Harlan. She was left alone with a large family when Barton died at the young age of 46 so was a true pioneer in every sense of the word. But there is a long line of pioneers for centuries.

My story will start with the earliest Harlan(d) that is known and bring you to the present time with the roads they traveled and emigrated to various locations. The Harlans struggled for over 200 years getting to the midwest but the Woolmans did not arrive in America until the late 1800's and went straight to Nebraska as far as we know. Every line leads back to England as a beginning point. Even the Wolfe families who came to Nebraska from Pennsylvania married spouses coming from England. I am hoping to learn more of the Wolfe beginnings if I am given enough time to search them out.

This has been such an interesting project for me. When I first took over all of this after my mother's death in 1986 I was confused as to where to start and how to make some sense of it all. So I have tried different charts, made up my own forms, family trees, etc. In the process of copying names over and over again I have become fairly acquainted with a lot of them and usually learn something new that I had overlooked before.

One confusing issue was cleared up when I realized I had two great-grandfathers with the first name of Alfred. (Alfred Woolman was supposed to have been the one that wore the red wig - and that is "supposed to be" where we descendents got the red tint to our hair).

So now I hope I have whetted an interest for you that you will continue on with these pages. Whenever there was something of interest I would add it and included several pictures of the older generations that were available.

This edition most likely will be changed with future additions and probably many corrections, but having a computer makes it easy to do. When I think of all the hours which my mother spent copying information for some interested relative to leave the legacy behind. She had heard that there was a connection to the Mayflower, but she never knew just what it was. She had copied so much information from photo-copied sheets out of "the Harlan Book" which was not available to her as it was out of print.

Since her death "The Book" went back into publication and I was able to obtain a copy at almost half the price that it had been selling for before it was no longer available. This book was published originally about 1914 by one Alpheus Harlan and contains over one thousand pages.

So if you want more stories and pictures of relatives, I have, besides the Harlan Genealogy, and Aman/Butler book (for the Wolfe line), and a Furnas County (Nebraska) History, plus all of the volumes of notebooks I have compiled to put together all the pieces.