Certain things about them will never be known to us...what they looked like, their individual personalities, how they interacted as a family.  Was Thomas tall and lean with a decided sparkle emanating from dark blue eyes?  Or short and stocky with a tendency to drool for no apparent reason and gaze at one's ear when he spoke to them?  No portraits of the third son of Bryan Bowlby and Elizabeth Manners hang in famous museums which leaves each of us with the joy and fun of picturing him in our mind's eye in a manner best suited to our own imaginations. Perhaps this family was mired in what we think of today as "dysfunction."   One of their children may have been a little monster...the "difficult child" in the family.  One of them perhaps a prankster, one dauntless in the face of danger, and yet another scared witless by the very thought of his own shadow.  Perhaps Thomas and Martha quarreled a good deal and Thomas often fled to a nearby pub for conversation with his friends and a little too much ale.  Perhaps Martha's parting words to her husband were something less than loving...along the lines of "How could you do this to us, you heathen...I don't care about all that land over there, you'll all be eaten by bears within a week!" 

But for the sake of our God-given right to memory unabashedly tinged with sentiment and highly romanticized allegory, this is not the way most of us would choose to imagine those last days...even moments...in 1727, as Thomas Bowlby and three of his young sons prepared to board a ship  at a port unknown to us in England and embark on a voyage which would, unknowingly, pave the way for us to be born Americans!

We can know with certainty that they were brimming with emotion as they prepared to set sail for a land that would become home to the sons all the rest of their days, and that they had to have carried with them bittersweet feelings of sadness, loss, confusion (do I pack this, should this be left here?), trepidation and, certainly, the excitement inherent in the launch of any such new beginning. 

No videotape survives which allows us to share in their last days together in England as a family.  We do know that somewhere, safely tucked away in a secret lock box labeled "the past", there remain traces of their last meal together, of the memories they were to carry with them, of all that occurred on that last night in England...and of the dawning of the actual day on which Thomas bade what would be his last good-bye to his wife and the children he would never live to see reach adulthood.  And John, George, and Richard (only 7 years old) -- the sons who prepared to accompany him -- saying their farewells to their mother, three sisters, and three brothers.

Only an historian well versed in the early 18th-century era could describe to us the kind of boat they sailed on...how long they were likely to be at sea...the clothes they wore...what they might have done to entertain themselves during their voyage of many weeks.   Surely they must have mused with a certain amount of apprehension what the future in a new country on a new continent held for each of them.  Which of their possessions would they have been likely to pack?  We know that among these was a gold ring given to George by his sister Martha, which would many years hence be bequeathed in George's will to a granddaughter named Martha.

And we do know that they made it safely to their new homeland.

Thomas would die in Burlington, New Jersey less than four years later...but his sons would stay, and, as far as we know, never again set foot on their native land. In the 1730s, rumblings in pubs and at hearth side over "taxation without representation" were far in the offing but would precede between England and America a long, fiercely fought war which would come to be known as the American Revolution.  Thousands of families would be torn asunder by divided loyalties, and among them would be those of Thomas’ sons and grandsons.  A little boy named Thomas Jefferson who would write a magnificent time-honored document which began "When in the course of human events..." and would precipitate this Revolution had not yet been born, nor had the son of Mary Ball and Augustine Washington, who would one day preside over the great and glorious infant country that would emerge from this as yet unheard of conflict.

As Loyalists, Richard's family would move during and after the Revolution to Nova Scotia and to what is known today as Ontario.  Through his eleven children, he remains today the major known progenitor of Bowlby lines across Canada.  Richard would die just shy of 100 years old at his home in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia.

George would die in Morris County, New Jersey in 1773 at age 62.  Four of his seven sons would remain Loyalists to the British Crown; three others would serve in the Morris County Militia.

John would marry and  in 1737 move from Burlington to what is today Warren County, New Jersey.  He would build a house and a mill on the banks of the Muscenetcong River in a tiny hamlet known as Imlaydale, raise his five children there, and die there in 1782 at the age of 79.

In the 1740s, their sister Elizabeth would accompany their brother Thomas from England to join them in New Jersey.  Elizabeth would marry and reside there the rest of her life, dying childless.  Thomas would journey to Philadelphia where he is buried in Christ Church Cemetery having died 9 days short of his 81st birthday.  Among his descendants would be a female child named Margaretta Large Fitler who would be better known as "Happy" and would marry a man named Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, a Governor of New York, and, ultimately, Vice President of the United States.

Over the years, our ancestors would begin to scatter and migrate to places called "states" ....Oregon, Kansas, Michigan, North Carolina, Illinois,  Alaska.  Some of them would end up in a place known as Australia.

These families would flourish and many of them would pass from generation to generation papers documenting their lineage, along with letters, photographs, family Bibles, and the treasure of spoken memories.

In the early 1950s in an area which came to be known as the "Midwest" an eight year old seventh great-granddaughter of Thomas Bowlby would sit in the back seat of her aunt's car looking up at the grandfather she loved so much and would lose so soon, and ask him to tell her about his parents, siblings, and aunts and uncles.  As a grown woman, she would remember only that her aunt had run into a food market and that rain had been streaming down the car's windows...and that her interest in "family" had been a part of her even as a child.  Then one day, immersed in the throes of researching her grandfather's family, she would see listed before her as one of his aunts the name "Malvina" and would retrieve with vivid clarity the memory of her giggling when he had mentioned his favorite aunt "Viny" because the name had sounded so silly to her.

Then -- almost 300 years hence -- as the Millennium in which Thomas and his sons commenced their new lives in America neared its end,  in a mysterious, elusive corner of our galaxy called Cyberspace, a device referred to as a computer would serve as a conduit for a mode of communicating called the Internet which would serve to unite hundreds of thousands of their unborn descendants -- along with the descendants of their siblings and those of their forbears -- and meld them into something called a database which would contain a web site which would be shared worldwide with great respect, love, and gratitude among these descendants as