Bill Cowan's Homelier Pages

Introduction

The pages linked from here are for my ancestors and descendants. If you are neither an ancestor nor a descendant of mine, you do not belong. Please do not remain here. There are more interesting places for you on the internet than here. Kindly be gone!

I wish neither this page nor the ones linked from it to appear in any compilation or index of the internet. All these pages contain tags requesting internet crawlers to avoid them, but respecting the tags is voluntary. I can password protect them so that access is only possible for those who register a password with me, but would prefer not to do so.

As a more civilized alternative I request that you not put links to these pages into any publicly accessible web page of your own. This request does not apply to book-marking.

Each ancestor or descendant has an individual page with the same set of sections:

• their full name plus their date and place of birth and death,
• their parents,
• their partner(s),
• their children, by partner,
• stories I know about them, and
• references to sources of this information.

Let me say a few things about sources of information.

• When I was younger I spent a lot of time listening to people a generation or two older than me telling stories about their lives. No doubt what I remember is a small fraction of what I heard: would that I could remember more. These stories have all the faults of oral tradition: no two tellings are identical. I write them as I would tell them, as stories that entertain as well as inform. Occasionally, I find creditable archival details; when necessary I bend a story to agree with them.
• Most relationship information is confirmable. When I have confirmed it I give the source. Confirmable information in stories I also reference. When the source is something I heard or found written on the back of an envelope, whether once or many times, I label as "hearsay" or "from the horse's mouth". (The most interesting stuff I have is of this kind.

The first page, to which all others are directly or indirectly linked, is mine.