My family tree has always interested me, mildly, but never to the extent of putting me in that mob that, so we're told, has raised genealogy to the secondmostpopular American pastime. (The first seems to be NASCAR, which I find even harder to imagine.) Already I seemed to know more than most beginning family tree climbers. Ancestral lore was common knowledge, it seems, in my family, the stuff of visits and reunions. And I was fortunate, I suppose, in falling heir to the labors of other family members, at least one of whom was bound and determined to get into the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Serendipitous, too, is the term for a raft of family papers just sent me by Col. H. Gordon McRay USMC Ret., 11142 Bimini Dr., Santa Ana CA 92705.

Of course I wellknew one Charles P. McRay (died 1896) occupied a burial space on the Thomas lot in Deepwood Cemetery. And a 20-year-ago Vernon County Historical Society inquiry from one Allen McRay, Kansas City, (Gordon's brother, now deceased) had cleared up the ThomasMcRay tie.

It was a common enough story. (Family genealogies are all pretty much alike. Perhaps that's the reason I can't muster the usual zeal for numbing details.) In frontier days friends and neighbors most often went West together, rather than singly, in wagon trains. How or where the eastern-born Thomases and McRays first met, by the time of their 1860 move on from Indiana, they were friends, and then some. Just eight years later Charles P. McRay became the husband of 16-year-old Josephine Frances Thomas, my great aunt.

When Charles died in 1896 it was only reasonable to bury him on the Thomas lot, above all since "Uncle Van" Thomas meanwhile had westered, yet again, to Arizona, leaving room for other Thomases, not to mention (you guessed it) Brophys. ("Uncle Van," as an interesting aside, married Martha, sister of "Lady Bushwhacker" Eliza Gabbert. And, oh yes, the VCHS has heard from Gabberts too, of a "Gabbert family reunion" yet!) Gordon McRay intriguingly expanded on the info gathered by my DAR-bemused cousin. The following comes directly, with elisions, from "The History of Clermont County, Ohio, 1795-1880: Biographical Sketches of its Prominent Men and Pioneers."

"Col. William Thomas was born 1801, in Redstone, Pa. His father James was born 1779 in Maryland, and his mother, of Holland Dutch descent, in 1775 in New Jersey. She was a little girl when Washington fought the battle of Trenton.

"William's grandfather was born on the eastern shore of Maryland, while his greatgrandfather was John Thomas, who came to America from Wales about the year 1680. He was a very large planter, and served for years as high sheriff in the Maryland colony.

"William's grandfather (also a William), at Bladensburg, Md., was captain of a troop of horse MinuteMen in the Revolution, and served under Gen. Richard Henry 'LightHorse Harry' Lee" (who, of course, was the father of Gen. Robert E. Lee).

What I want to know is: Where the devil is that "very large plantation?" Shouldn't it be all mine? As a self-styled "gentleman of leisure" I'm sure I'd make a dandy planter.

It only goes to point up the fact that our ancestors come in the thousands, not just one at a time per generation. Those commercially touted "coats of arms" legally belong to only one man, eldest son of the eldest son etc. ad inf. I play about with a "Brophy coat of arms," but lawfully it either belongs to but one man or has died out for failure of sons.

Likewise, there'd be a bazillion Thomas heirs to claim that plantation, if (what's likeliest) the line hadn't fallen on hard times and had to sell it, whole or piecemeal.

My other maternal line beats the Thomases all hollow. The Gardners were damn Yankees, but couldn't help it. The first of their many American lines landed on Cape Cod in the ship Anne in 1638, beating the Thomases by 42 years, and being beaten by the Pilgrim Fathers, the "firsts," by just 18! The Gardners were French Huguenots (Protestants) who absconded to England from the untender mercies of Louis 14th. Whether there were literal or original gardeners going by the name is unclear, but it was Jardinier until anglicized.

The Gardner info comes, obscurely, from "Some Records of Persons by the Name of Worden," the work of Oliver Norton Worden, privately printed in Lewisburg, Pa., in 1868. A kinswoman furnished us a photocopy of the book a couple of decades ago.

Hardbound genealogy books were rare birds in 1868. The author begins by cataloging the many forms the Worden name has taken, leaving me wondering if I'm a cousin (at 10 million or so removes) of Vernon County's Wardins, e.g. the late H. W. "Jack" Wardin.

Among the mildly intriguing facts to be picked up from the book is that one John Lorimer Worden commanded the new ironclad U.S.S. Monitor in its celebrated fight with the CS.S. Vir ginia

"She was not a seaworthy vessel, and only Worden's resolution and devoted duty kept her from being lost."

He was wounded in the eyes but regained his sight. Any decent Rebel would have saluted this honorable adversary.

The book is a "good read" considering its nature; but it takes dedicated wading to come to "The Eleventh Generation" (i.e. of Wordens since 1638) to find, sandwiched among the usual raft of siblings, one Julius Alonzo Gardner, born 1842 in Iowa.

He married an Ellen, the daughter of a Mitchell, the daughter of a Worden, so earning him space in the book.

Julius and wife Frances wound up on a farm just west of the "Warwick comer" on present Highway DD, a mile due south of onetime Rousertown. Warwick School once stood on that very comer, and Civil War cannonballs have been found on the property.

My mother told of daylong family junkets down to visit the "old folks" and enjoy a picnic at the Warwick Baptist Church, now also sadly long gone. My mother and aunt both inherited the fiery red hair bome by all the seven Gardner daughters.

You'd think a family so overstocked with nubile daughters would've been trying hard to unload them. Yet my mother said her grandmother seemed to sit away her whole life gazing out the window and scouring the printed word, all of which she was convinced was "made-up." She didn't even teach the girls to cook. "No Gardner woman could boil water without burning it," my father swore. Yet, poor cooks or no, they all did find husbands.

My dashing, confirmed bachelor grandfather Richard J. Thomas, the story goes, was on day galloping past on his fine black stallion when he glimpsed a barefoot 16-year-old redhead drawing water from a well. Whatever the chemistry, he rode straight on to the house and got right down to brass tacks. He was only some three times her 16, but what the heck! Wedlock fatally set in, and they lived wretchedly ever after.

But what the heck again? But for them, and all those gadzillion others, I wouldn't be here idly to oneup most genealogists: "Me? Oh, I'm just a l4th generation American."