"In Wales, every harvest from 1789 to 1802 was bad," writes historian Gwyn A. Williams in The Search for Beulah Land. A grain shortage and famine prices made things worse. Small wonder that Simon James - a young preacher with a wife, baby, and connections in the infant United States - decided to leave home and seek better conditions. American conditions were variable: Simon preached near Philadelphia; undertook a new gathering in rocky western Pennsylvania...

"Worthy Thrall (1809-1851) was the youngest of ten children and a seventh son. He and wife Hannah James (1809-1874) had seven children, four of whom lived to grow up. Settling near Bone Gap, Edwards County, Illinois, he was a farmer, blacksmith, woodworker, and a Methodist class leader. Midwestern Methodists follows Worthy and Hannah's four children, 16 grandchildren, and 38 great-grandchildren through 209 years -- the eight, ninth and tenth generations...

Arthur Maynard Sikes was born in 1920 in Connecticut to Maynard Lyman Sikes and Ada Belle Pickens. In 1944 he married Arlene Austin (born 1920), daughter of Charles Fred Austin and Mary Lillian La Fountain. They had five children.

Benedictus Alford was born in about 1616 in Whitestaunton, Somerset, England. He married Jane Newton 26 November 1640 in Windsor, Connecticut. They had four children. He died in 1683. Descendants and relatives lived mainly in Connecticut and New York.

Pedigree charts documenting the ancestry and siblings of Mary Hayes Griffin (b. 1913), daughter of Willard Carl Griffin and Teresa Elvira Briggs. Her parents were married in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1911.

John Winchell and his family emigrated from England to Watertown, Massachusetts in 1631. He was joined later by his father, Thomas, and three brothers, Humphrey, John and Robert (d.1669). Descendants and relatives lived in New England, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin and elsewhere.