Welcome to the new Jackson County (WV) Pioneer Project. It is being revived as a place where you, the Jackson County researcher, can share your information with others in an easy way.

Because of WVGenWeb's server limitations, JCPP will be hosted on the West Virginia Pioneers website, but will be in a separate "tree" from it, although both can be searched at the same time. You are invited to send me your gedcom to be included. There are a few rules:

Who: It must be primarily Jackson County, WV, families. You may include direct lines back to the earliest ancestor, and this may include the children of the ancestors, but not children/families that did not move to Jackson County. (If Sam had sons John and David and only John moved to Jackson County, you may include John and his descendants, but only David's wife and children - not the rest of his descendants, unless some of them moved to Jackscon County.) When a family leaves Jackson County, only the generation leaving can be included. We want to know where they went to, as well as where they came from. There is a lot of leeway in this rule, but remember, it's Jackson County families we want, not one person who passed through Jackson County and settled in Kansas.

When: Because we are looking for the families that settled the county (Pioneers), there is a cutoff date of roughly 1875 for the move into Jackson County. If they are found in a Jackson county census in 1840-1870, we want them. Cutoff for children would be those born by about 1910. This is to preserve the privacy of individuals who are still living. Please do not submit names without dates, if you know them.

What: When a gedcom is sent to me, I will do a quick check to make sure it meets these requirements, then upload it to the website. Each person's gedcom will be placed in a separate brach of the JCPP tree, and will be under the control of the person who contributes it. Only they, or someone they specify, can make changes to the data. It will not be like some websites where others can overwrite your data. We may have the same person in several trees, with different dates, parents, etc. This gives everyone a chance to do more research to find proof of what is correct.

Sources: There are a lot of us who started doing this and never considered how important sources are, so we have data that has no source. We know we got it from Mom or Aunt Bessie or maybe we visited a cemetery and got the dates. But if you have sources listed, it makes it much more valuable.

We've all seen trees that look like they've been lifted from a FTM CD or from an online tree. We want YOUR research, because YOU are Jackson county. Therefore, we reserve the right to reject any GEDCOMS that appears to have been copied from another online tree, such as those on Ancestry, Family Search, etc.

Most important: Don't include anything you don't want used by someone else. The whole purpose of doing this is to build a genealogy of the early days of Jackson county, which means if you know about those pesky Fishers, and someone else finds it and have Fisher ancestors, they are going to copy what they need. On the other hand, if you find someone else has contributed data that you have and agree with, it would be helpful if you 'prune' your gedcom so there isn't too much duplication. We want enough to connect families, but too much duplication will only take up space on the server.

Our goal is to provide genealogy information freely to all, and to this end we are looking for genealogists and family historians who are willing to share their research. If you would like to participate, you must be able to create a gedcom from your genealogy software. Please contact Betty Briggs for instructions on how to add your family data. Thanks for sharing!