Introduction

The information contained here is the result of many years of part-time research. I started in 1991 with a package of information that had been given out at the Pauley/Peebles Family Reunion held in Xenia, Ohio in the summer of 1984. (At that gathering, Kasey Pauley, my youngest daughter, won the award for the youngest attendee and Thelma Pauley, my paternal grandmother, won the award for the oldest attendee.) That information, and a simple software package, was the start of a journey that is still in progress. I started off writing some letters to Pauleys in the Washington, DC metropolitan area telephone book and, although none of them were related to me, things just took off from there. During this journey I have corresponded with and met many interesting people. Some are confirmed relatives and others might be once a connection is found.

While I am certainly interested in both sides of my parents’ families, the Sprague family, from which my mother is descended, is already well documented. Although I have only a few relevant pages from it, there is a book that was published in the early 1 900s that documents the Sprague family back to England in the 1500s and an excellent Sprague family website. The Pauleys, on the other hand, have less documentation and lots of unanswered questions. I have also spent time working on the Hill (paternal grandmother) and Chatten (maternal grandmother) families.

This is still very much a work in progress. There are still many facts to obtain and people to find. In the first generation presently known, Edward Polly had six or possibly eight children and I have information about only some. From this austere start there are now over 5000 persons in my database (many are not shown here). There are similar examples in other generations so the discovery of other relatives is ongoing. In the 1860 Annotated Census of Kanawha County, West Virginia, for example, there are twenty-one Pauley families listed. I currently have information on only some of them. As I document the different families, I typically only show one generation of non-Pauley children so there are a lot of ”cousins” out there that I have not recorded. For those readers directly related to me, my line is: Edward, David, Joseph A., Samuel, Squire, George Washington, Charles Edgar, Ira Lee, Ira Lee Jr. then me.

One problem encountered by today’s researchers is that of changing political boundaries. Most of the colonies were created with a handful of counties or subdivisions each. For example, in Colonial Virginia two of its western counties extended to present day Michigan. As time went on and the population increased, more states and counties were created. A single point in Virginia could have been in as many as five or six different counties between the mid-1700s and the mid-1900s. The westward migrations of the late l700s often resulted in people moving faster than the government could keep up. In the case of Virginia, it also lost counties as a result of the formation of West Virginia in 1862. These changes make it hard for those looking for original documents and records since any town or area may have been in several different counties over the years. While this is not as much of a problem in the Midwest and west, it is a big problem in the colonial states. All of these boundary changes may result in some information shown in the individual records being inaccurate and have certainly made research a challenge.