Like a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree...

                  “If you don't know your family's history, 

 then you don't know anything.

 You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree”

                                                                              -- Michael Crichton

Do you know who your great grandparents are? Or where your family originated from?  Do you know who sacrificed a comfortable life, or worked themselves to death, so that you, their descendants, could have a better life than they did?  Unless you have had an interest in family history, you probably don't. Most people of our time period, will leave this life never knowing who they really were because they are disconnected from their family beyond the grandparents they personally knew.

We are all part of God's family. We are His children. Earthly families are part of His design and plan for men --to be able to grow up in a circle of parents and other family members who care for and teach their children, so that each new generation can benefit from the lessons learned by the previous generations.  

Families are not just for this life - their relationship is meant to be eternal, meaning the blessing of being together can go beyond this life.  In fact, it is part of God's plan that each generation be LINKED to each of the generations before, in one long chain back to Adam.  And those chain links are welded through the sealing powers of the Priesthood.

Despite the breakdown in modern families, God is in charge of this world's final outcome.  His work will go forth.  He prepares people to be "cogs" in His work -- and I hope I am one of His cogs.

E. Clayton Wyand was one of those cogs. Clayton was born April 22, 1875 and, since his childhood days, he had a desire to know "who he was."  At age 18 he contracted spinal meningitis and became deaf for the rest of his life. After two years learning the mercantile business, he entered Maryland School for the Deaf in 1894. There he learned printing and prepared for college, later graduating from Gauladet National College for the Deaf. 

E. Clayton Wyand's passion, to know who his family was, led him to visit local libraries, areas his family had lived, and relatives far flung. He read countless old Family Bibles, gleaned newspaper articles, mined records from courthouses and examined every graveyard in which, perchance, there might be a stone of interest.  

The result was a comprehensive history of his family, his ancestors, and his extended cousins -- with names, dates AND PHOTOS, from the earliest German immigrant in 1743 to Clayton's living relatives in 1909.

As often happens, after all his work, Wyand's book was eventually forgotten.  In that time period, it wasn't easy to get publications advertised and out to everyone who might be interested in them.  But the work was not in vain. A copy of the book was preserved in a library and Google eBooks scanned and made it freely available to everyone through their online database.  

And that is where I found it:  A Brief History of the Andrew Putman (Buttman, Putnam), Christian Wyandt (Weyandt, Weygandt, Voint, Wyand) and Adam Snyder (Schneider) Families of Washington county, Maryland published in 1909.

What a joy it was to look through!  So many people, our family, who had lived, and died, had been forgotten, but were now found!  

This is where I can see God's hand was directing E. Clayton Wyand
 to preserve this important heritage,
and how God directed me to find it.