Eight Branches, One Family

In August 1932, someone stood up at the Hall reunion at Valley Chapel and read a typed family history aloud — naming their sources: William Hall's own grandchildren. In the decades after, Patricia Ann Stalnaker Hall — trained at the Maryland Institute of Fine Arts — researched, collected, captioned, and hand-calligraphed the family tree book that anchors two of these pages. In 1978, Lee Anna Harris Hall sat down and hand-drew the Harris family charts this archive rebuilt a whole branch from. In 2025 and 2026, Deb Hall Eddy — Jim and Pat's eldest, Ian's aunt — sat down to a year of Storyworth questions at his request and wrote the first account of her parents, her grandmothers and the farm by someone who lived there: the fifth telling, and the first in a daughter's voice. And now Ian, their son and grandson, carries it on — checking each telling against censuses, manifests, pension files, and gravestones, keeping every word of theirs on file verbatim, and adding what the records alone can supply.

So the method here is simple. Every fact traces to a named source. Where the family's own tellings and the records disagree, both are kept — the disagreements are part of the story. And where the earlier record-keepers speak, these pages quote them, because they were there and we were not.

It is meant to stay alive. As more records surface — an aunt's photo album, a cousin's memory, a newly digitized archive — these pages will be updated, not replaced.