Pepin "the Frank" to Harry St. Clair Walker of Pennsylvania: A View of 38 Generations of Life

When I was a young child living in Baltimore, Maryland during the mid-1940s, I frequently shuffled through my parent's photograph drawer in the bottom of the dining room cabinet. Like many young families in those days, my parents relocated to Baltimore to work in the war industries. My mother and father were happy with their new independence provided by a steady income, but I longed for my earlier life on my maternal grandfather's pastoral Pennsylvania farm with its large family household.The two or three hundred photographs helped me re-experience those happy years, but as time passed by my hope of returning to rural Pennsylvania faded. I began avoiding the photo drawer, whose pictures only reminded me of my loss. I mention this story because I believe that most genealogists, whether professional, or an amateur like myself, contain within themselves some similar story of happiness in their past that later fueled their interest in this hobby.During my adolescence and young adulthood, faint memories of my farm life continued. At about age forty, I began looking at those old photographs in a different light. With the confidence of age I learned the importance of those early formative years and realized that I had lost more happiness by avoiding those early memories than their avoidance reduced my loss.I began organizing the old photographs in albums by dates, asking my parents and other relatives for assistance in their documentation. Soon I was corresponding with family members I had not seen since my childhood, requesting their old photographs for copying to fill in blank periods of time, which resulted in a distant relative, whom I had never met, mailing me several genealogical family charts naming ancestors that my mother and father had not known-it was when I received those charts that I became an amateur genealogist...The second part of each chapter contains many of the newsworthy events that occurred during that generation's lifetime-in some cases directly involving that ancestor, or in most instances would in some manner enter the lives of that ancestor's descendants. Everything that exists in the present has come out of the past and no matter how new and unique it seems to be, it carries some of the past with it. Every item in the modern household-every thought in the modern man's mind-has a history of its own. Creative thinking consists of new combinations of old knowledge put to use. The house of the present is filled with windows into the past...Until about 1200 A.D., the ability to read and write was almost the exclusive right and ability of the Church and some government agencies. The records were kept mainly for tax collections and other legal matters. Although most people spoke to each other in their native tongue, the common language of the Church and government throughout medieval Europe was Latin. Latin formed a bridge between the countries, insofar as Church and legal matters were concerned, but it served to separate these two important establishments from the rest of society. ..I have organized a gathering of data left by others with the hope that the reader will feel the same joy and entertainment that I felt in compiling it. I have assembled a generation by generation history based upon the historical facts available to myself, and with this thought, I would be pleased if this work serves to encourage others to add to these chapters as additional information makes itself known.Ronald Dennis WalkerBaltimore, Maryland1994 (updated 2014)