Behind The Names

In 1984 a daughter made her father a poster: eight generations of Peltons, a name and a date on each slip of paper, from Battle Creek, Michigan, back to England. Forty years later, her son went looking for the people behind those names.

Behind the Names follows three families to one marriage. The Peltons crossed from England to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and spent three centuries moving north and west, through Connecticut, Vermont, Upper Canada and Michigan. The Greys farmed the hill country of northern Kentucky and crossed the river to Cincinnati. The Irwins were tailors and blacksmiths in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, for more than a century. On June 25, 1949, Raymond Pelton married Gloria Grey.

Built from wills, deeds, census sheets, coroner's records, old newspapers and family memory, this is the story of a Puritan couple put out of their church, a Loyalist's daughter on the Canadian frontier, a laborer shot at the Straits of Mackinac by a hand no one named, and a father who walked out of the Cincinnati directories and was never seen again. It is also the story of the half of the family the poster left out.

The book reproduces more than 130 photographs and original records, from a 1771 will signed with a mark to the family's own snapshots, and sets every life against its own time: the colony, the war, the frontier, the factory town and the Depression.

Dr. Courtney Carson Gober is a historian by education and a school administrator by profession. His first family history, Both Feet Cut Off, Yet We Stand, traced his father's family. This one is for his mother, Linda Rose Pelton, who made the poster.