Thoughts continue to swirl about this site and my telling of the Anderson history. Through my research of several years I have found our family linked to several early settlers of the North American continent. This story brings together political, social, economic and religious changes in America.

We have roots in New England and the early pilgrim immigrants, we also have ancestors who were linked to varieties of Quaker belief in New England, Delaware/Maryland and North Carolina.

Other ancestors participated in the migration away from the fertile tobacco farms of the Chesapeake Bay, probably as those lands became exhausted. These economic conditions led to brief settlement in North Carolina. Along the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay Anderson and Horney families joined one another. Both were participants in the strict Nicholite form of Quakerism and may have been among the first to free their slaves. In North Carolina these families did not hold slaves, setting them apart from others who had settled the rich farmlands of Guilford County, North Carolina.

The Anderson clan participated in the early movement away from the Atlantic coast into the interior about 1801 or 1802. These pioneers settled in Ohio in an area that would later become one of the routes taken by the Underground Railroad to funnel Negro slaves out of the South and on to Canada. The Anderson clan joined with the Coffin family and the Quakers in this part of Ohio.

From Ohio these intrepid pioneers moved on to Iowa and the fertile agricultural lands in Greene County. Some came before the beginning of the Civil War, others arrived in the latter part of that decade after having served in Union infantry units from Ohio. The late 1880s found our direct line in Iowa, there they joined families who had originated in Canada and a Protestant Irish line who arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1840s.

By the middle of the 20th century one small part of the Anderson clan had moved to the west coast settling in Washington State and Oregon. These are my immediate family — my father and mother, and my father’s brother. The arrival on the west coast was prompted by major events in American history: the Great Depression and World War II. Depression pushed families away from the midwest, the burgeoning ship-building industry on the coast pulled them.

In the late 20th Century the movement of the family begins to wash back across the continent: to Quebec in Canada and Colorado in the United States. As in earlier periods some members remained behind in the first locations.

Today we will find branches of this great family in nearly every region of the North American continent.