Gaulding Origins

Colonel Brooke Payne once said: "An extended exploration through the silent and forgotten past wherein lie buried the records of our ancestors reveals very luminously our kinship with the world of strangers among whom we now live - the homogeneity of our race.  This is the truth that lies at the bottom of the ancestral well.  Such a search is made in the spirit of reverence for all those countless buried millions who contributed towards making us what we are will inevitably develop in us a sense of our kinship with all mankind, a sense of wholesome and becoming humility and a broad tolerance."

That is the objective.  We must take what we find, in humility and tolerance.  The farther back along the road we travel the more we discover that we are all related in some way and that there really is no individual story but only threads pulled from the fabric of the same great tapestry. The story of my emergence is therefore the story of our emergence; my history is our history and in America and in the south in particular all roads lead back to Virginia.