In Mem­ory of the First Set­tlers of Hartford

The Barnard Geneal­ogy group (click here) on Face­book is “a net­work for peo­ple research­ing the geneal­ogy of the Barnard sur­name.” It is a closed group, which merely means you need to ask the group to join. We’ll be glad to have you!

So what is the con­nec­tion to the Strong Fam­ily Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica?

Since August 10, 1975, we exist to:

• Pro­mote the recog­ni­tion of our heritage.
• Pro­vide a means of learn­ing more of our forebears.
• Pro­mote friend­ships among the diverse Strong family.
• Obtain and/or pre­serve arti­facts of our heritage.
• Pass on all the above to suc­ceed­ing generations.

Most of us descend from either Elder John Strong (ca. 1610–1699) and his first wife Margery Deane (d. with infant abt. 1635), which we call the John Strong Jr. line, or Elder John Strong and his sec­ond wife Abi­gail Ford (1619–1688) and their 16 children.

Their daugh­ter Sarah Strong (1656–1733/34) mar­ried Joseph Barnard Sr. (abt. 1650–1695), son of Fran­cis Barnard and Han­nah Meru­ell of Hadley, MA. Joseph and Sarah (Strong) Barnard are my 8th great grand­par­ents — and that is how the Strong Fam­ily Asso­ci­a­tion con­nects to the Barnard genealogy!

Some time soon, per­haps this sum­mer, it may be time to cre­ate a Strong Fam­ily Asso­ci­a­tion group on Face­book. We have tried quite a num­ber of “group” things online in the past. Long ago, we had a Strong mail­ing list on one of the major online ser­vices (per­haps Geni?). We have tried mail­ing lists, bul­letin boards, and Google groups.

Face­book is here to stay, and many of us have a Face­book account. Mine is here. The Face­book groups seem very easy to use, and act pretty much like any other Face­book account. We can set the group so that it is vis­i­ble to the world at large, but only mem­bers get to post to it.