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You may or may not know that I have been working for the past year and more to compile a second edition of Thelma Leasure Marshall's book, "The Descendants of Abraham LeSueur, the Huguenot and Allied Families of North America." It's to the point now where I am able to give you a progress report and request some assistance.
Thelma's book contained approximately 800 pages and 6,000 plus names of descendants. With the advent of the Internet, genealogical research has greatly expanded our horizons since 1991. Using the family trees many of you have posted at ROOTSWEB, I have managed to increase the information available to more than 27,000 names (and climbing) of individuals, spouses, and allied family members, many of whom come from areas where there were gaps in Thelma's work, like Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.
I have been through the entire lists of all the spelling variations of LEASURE I could think of at ROOTSWEB (probably 25,000-30,000 names) at least half a dozen times. I have even typed Thelma's book completely twice since my old computer crashed and the gurus could not retrieve the data from its hard drive. (I know you back-up freaks are out there laughing your heads off, but I learned that lesson, too, believe me!) I have sorted, studied, correlated, eliminated duplicates, added individuals and corrected all along the way. I firmly believe I have done more good than evil, but if I have completely missed the boat on your family, I am counting on you to let me know where I went astray. I tried my best to eliminate such popular fallacies as couple or individuals younger than 13 or older than 60 becoming parents, full siblings born 30-40 years apart, babies born before their parents were born or more than a year later than their demise. Where I could not reconcile the data, I left it as is was in the first edition and commented upon the problem in the “Notes” section attached to the individual. Don’t get mad if I’ve blown it—just call it to my attention and I will be happy to send out errata sheets to purchasers of the 2nd edition as well as incorporate corrections into my own data base so there will be the possibility of an even better, more complete, 3rd edition somewhere down the line.
Right now I'm in the process of scanning the illustrations from TLM's book. Unfortunately, I think most of them will be of only marginal quality, since many of them were already copies of copies of copies. I have had to leave many out simply because there was no way they would possibly reproduce one more time or because Thelma did not identify the people in them and I couldn't tell who they were, either, from reading the surrounding pages of data. I would love to have more illustrations, though, and so I am appealing to you. If you have treasured photographs of your parents, aunts/uncles or grandparents, places, even tombstones, would you please have a good quality xerox copy made (The people at Kinkos or AlphaGraphics will be happy to help you get the best possible copy and you will be charged only for the one you accept.)? You may send either B&W or color copies, but I would very much appreciate receiving B&W because it scans better and will be more legible in the book. Also, if you have any family stories to share about individuals in your particular family, I will be happy to include them and cite their source if I have your ancestor in my database.
You may send them to: Gloria Kerns, 6728 South 1655 East, Cottonwood Heights, UT 84121. Yes, I know it says SLC (Salt Lake City) in the book, but this community just became Cottonwood Heights on January 1, 2005; before that it was SLC and I have better hunting projects than all my address notes to correct!) You may also e-mail them to me at askeyologist@yahoo.com. I wish I could tell you to fax them, but my fax machine is not of a quality good enough to receive transmitted illustrations. The manuscript is and the CD will be in Family Tree Maker format, but it should be compatible with most major genealogy programs (at least that's what the Help section on Books in my FTM program said).
In the back of the book I have included a list of the researcher's names from whom I drew information, their e-mail addresses (as posted at ROOTSWEB) and their data base identifier name. Therefore, if you wish to directly contact another researcher working your direct family line, say “Gloria Kerns,” you can look me up there by name and see that the family tree I posted at ROOTSWEB more than 5 years ago is identified by the word, “askeyologist”. Many identifiers are only numbers, so this little list of 1,000+ names may turn out more valuable than you think.
So far, the 2nd edition consists of almost 1,500 pages and has become far too unwieldy and expensive to think about a bound volume. Therefore, I am looking at releasing the book on a CD with a target price of $45. Thelma's book, when it came out in 1991, cost $65.00 each. I'm hoping that by using this format you will buy one not only for yourself, but one for each of your children or grandchildren as well. You can, of course, produce your own hard copy for each person you wish to give one too, but I think it will cost you at least $45 to do so. It will, however, give your descendants not only a sense of pride about belonging to this unique family, but a sense of continuity that many young people of today lack.
All in all, it’s been a fascinating, frustrating, rewarding year or two since I started living with all you LEASURES instead of just the one I’ve been married to for almost 50 years. You're a great bunch of people. I know you can't pick your relatives, but if it were possible to do so, I think no one would be ashamed to pick the LASHER-LASURE-LAZEAR-LAZIER-LEESURE-LEEZER-LEASURE-LEISURE-LESHER-LeSUEUR-LEZIER-(and other variations) family I have come to know. I sincerely hope this book will be useful to you in your research and that I have provided a “missing” link for some of you to be able to connect your immediate family with the correct line that leads back as far as is known about Abraham LeSueur and his family. At best, I hope it will inspire someone to pick up the banner of maintaining this history for the next generation or two. At worst, I hope you will cause you to do no more than shake your head and mutter, “What does SHE know? She’s not even a LEASURE!”
Gloria
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