What this Website is all about: This website is the result of continuing inquiries into my family's past and came about as a result of a Farnsworth Family Reunion held in Illinois in 1986. I realized that I really knew nothing about my mother's family (Farnsworth) except for those I knew personally. I started by going to the local library in Wyandotte, Michigan and then followed that research by gaining access to the files compiled by the Church of the Latter Day Saints. I visited the LDS Genealogy Library in Salt Lake City, Utah and of course queried my relatives. Following those efforts I created a "Tree" graphically which quickly grew very cumbersome to maintain and was later lost when the mainframe computer at work crashed. Luckily that "Tree" survived in hardcopy form in a 2.5 by 10 foot format. What I discovered early on was that there are a lot of Farnsworth's that are not related to me as far as I know. It seems that the most comprehensive research on the Farnsworth's was done on the descendants of Matthias Farnsworth. The "Farnsworth Memorial" compiled by Moses Franklin Farnsworth around 1897 followed by the "Farnsworth Memorial II" several years later make for interesting reading. The family of Samuel H. Farnsworth appears in book II under "Untraced Families" The information contained in that book on the Samuel H. Farnsworth family is not very accurate and is incomplete. My mother recalled that her Grandmother telling her about traveling to upstate New York to visit family when she was a child. That information led me to Essex county, New York where my wife and I read all we could find on the Farnsworth's in the libraries, public offices and Historical Museums in Westport, New York, Elizabethtown, New York and then to Montpelier, Vermont.
Having reached a brick wall at around 1819, I put out a call for help on Pam Farnsworth's "Farnsworth Family Newsletter" E-mail which she publishes periodically. I received a lot of suggestions as a result of that quest and by chance an E-mail from Douglas Dillon Farnsworth. Doug wanted to know if I was related to his Farnsworth's some of whom lived in Wyandotte, Michigan. At first I thought that we weren't related and then we started to see many coincidences that were too numerous to disregard such as both of our families coming from Westport, New York. After lengthy conversations via the internet we and our wives finally met at a restaurant outside of Knoxville, Tennessee and we spent a lengthy lunch hour pouring over all our hard copy documents and questions about "our" Farnsworth's. Our E-mail info trading continued and that ultimately led to a decision to try DNA comparison to establish that we were in fact related. My cousin William Ward Farnsworth agreed to let us use a sample of his DNA for comparison with Doug's DNA through a method that follows the paternal lineage. Out of the 25 markers tested we matched in all of them.
Now we had proof that we were in fact related and through Doug's persistent efforts through the internet we started to merge our two families and fill in a whole lot of blanks. It turns out that my 3G Grandfather, Samuel Hathaway Farnsworth, and Doug's 2G Grandfather James Hiram Farnsworth were brothers. We met again in Westport, New York in the summer of 2003 and continued our search throughout the area. Unfortunately we could not come up with an additional single piece of paper that identified the parents of Samuel Hathaway and James Hiram Farnsworth. This was due in large part to the fact that libraries burned and records were not always recorded as accurately as they are today. Continuing to search the internet for historical clues and census information, Doug has continued to fill in the blanks and we are as confident as we can be that our common Grandparents were Samuel H. Farnsworth born about 1788 in Vermont (St Albans?) and Betsy Hatch born December 31, 1788 in Hebron, New York.
The information contained on this website is as accurate as we know how to make it and we welcome your comments and any additional information that you would like to contribute. You may contact us at RRAPPUHN@aol.com or nando1314@tnaccess.com.