Volume 3 Number 1

Winter 1986

American Ethnicity

Ancient Skinner Lines

Myrtle S. Bohme Lineage

Clan MacGregor

Cook Co., IL Census

Cook Co., IL Wills

Thelma C. (Browning) Dalberg Lineage

Dead Briton - KGB

Debrett Update

Elephant two-step

Guild of One Name Studies

History of Eugene, Oregon (Chapter 1)

Letter From the Editor

Medical Quirks

miscSKlNNERlaneous

New Jersey Settlers

New Jersey Update

Off Broadway

Passages

Queries

Resources

Skinner-Hope Family Record

Jane Skinner Obituary

John Skinner of Hoodbridge

Josiah Skinner Will

Robert Skinner Line

William Skinner Lineage

Skinner Variants

Skinner's a hit

Vision Quest

Worshipful Company of Skinners

Index Page

Thanks to William Weiler for transcription of this article.

If it is important or advantageous to obtain the pedigree of our domestic animals or an abstract of title to our real estate, why is it not of more importance to preserve our family genealogy?

If blood or breeding tells in the lower order of animals, why not of more importance in the higher orders?

Wealth, beauty, passion, and convenience too often govern our mating rather than family character.

It is the duty of each individual as' far as possible to ascertain the character, environment, disposition, development, lines of success and failure of his ancestry, for he is the sum total in tendencies as a capital stock in which to start in the solution of life's problems and his or her own development.

While wealth is the great object toward which the masses are striving, and considered by the great majority as a standard of success, it is a delusion, unless used as a means to the greater end and purpose of life, which is the development of character. Not that you will become a saint or a millionaire, but that your powers whatever they may be may be fully unfolded.

Wealth honestly acquired and used to right ends of life may have a blessing, but if acquired by questionable methods or as an end, it will prove a curse and the destruction of its possessor. It is an economical truth that we only own that which we have earned; that which we have given an equivalent for in labor, thought, or affection. We labor for wages, study for knowledge, and love our parents, companions, and children without which we cannot own any of them. Let the reader take up each one of these propositions and think them out in their details.

While it is far from customary it should have a beginning in this generation while we can gather up a few scattering fragments of the lives of our ancestors and record them to which we should add our own experience to hand down to our posterity - as well as our small accomplishments of material wealth.

The great common people should record the experience of their own lives or have it done and leave it as material for future history and literature. When men and women begin to do this then they will begin and continue to live with their posterity. Would it not be a far better investment to write or have written by a competent biographer our life experience than to have erected over our grave a costly monument? What is there in our dead and decomposing bodies that we should show them such marked respect to the neglect of the more important life experience? No man lives a life that its experiences and lessons are not worth recording to be read by his posterity. Only those who have written or about whom records have been written are remembered. As Franklin has wisely said,

"If we would not be forgotten,
As soon as we are dead and rotten
We must do something worth writing
Or write something worth reading."

To the members of the Skinner-Hope family, Greeting: There was a time when the older members of these families lived in the same neighborhood in the old country, but when the older members began to die off and the younger families began to increase to Roosevelt proportions, they began to see the necessity of seeking new homes where there were greater opportunities for development and securing homes for their children.

In many if not in most of these changes resulted in a change of occupation of the younger members and with these changes comes a loss of interest in each other, a drifting away and forgetting kinsman or that they might be helpful to each other in any way.

It is when a person feels that they are alone in the world, lost to friends and kindred with no one who cares for them or that they care for

Each member of the Skinner-Hope family should congratulate themselves on the fact that the family has been free from the above toils and it is to be hoped that each member will do their duty in avoiding these great evils for many generations to come by avoiding all matrimonial unions with such families as have criminal or suicidal spots in their family history. Each member should investigate the history of the families into which they are thinking of marrying. If there are near relatives who are idiotic imbecile or criminal, there is danger of these characteristics appearing in the posterity of collateral relatives after skipping one or more generations. It is an old adage to breed a gentleman you must begin with his great grandfather. It is poor policy to compromise like the young man and young woman who were engaged to be married and the young man in giving his family history apologized for one of his relatives who had been hung; when the young lady replied, "0h, that's nothing. A Lot of mine should have been hung."

(The Skinner-Hope Family History is replete with personal memoirs of the family members, as well as line drawings of homes and locations associated with the writings. Over the next few issues of SKU I'll be including selections from the Skinner-Hope History. I hope that you enjoy them, and their messages. - Gregg)