The Quest: A Collection of Stories from This Too Shall Pass, Vol. 1

Join this family of three contemporary genealogy researchers on their hunt through the pastoral fields of western North Carolina in an effort to resurrect over 200 years of the past, as they seek to find their ancestor's 19th century farm and 'Big House,' and an 18th century log home and lost family graveyard - a journey filled with surprises and new acquaintances that will warm your heart and perhaps stir your own genealogical inquisitiveness. ABOUT "THE QUEST":For over 200 years the old Benjamin Daily family graveyard has sat serenely in the pastoral countryside of Ellenboro, North Carolina, on what used to be a Cherokee Indian village. And for nearly 100 years the aged graveyard, cloaked and hidden by tall grasses and ferns, has been lost, abandoned, and all but forgotten. Similarly, the location of Martha Malinda Daily and her husband Edmund Sylvester Hardin's farmhouse, built by him in the late 1800s and called the 'Big House,' was yet another unsolved mystery. Their house and farmland, according to Hardin/Daily family oral history, was said to have been situated somewhere near the Second Broad River in the Pea Ridge Road vicinity of Rutherford County, North Carolina. Was it also lost to posterity?For Dennis C. Martin and his two sisters, Cynthia Y. Whited and Tonya M. Rogers, the authors of the soon to be published genealogy book This Too Shall Pass, finding the Old Daily Graveyard and the log home built by their third great-grandfather Benjamin Daily in the 1790s, and the 'Big House' built over a century ago by their great-grandfather Edmund Sylvester Hardin, became a personal quest. These were the three Holy Grails of their family ancestry, and they sought to find that which might be lost, and that which possibly still existed. And so, armed with family stories, the writings of past genealogists, tax maps, modern satellite maps, and all that they had gleaned from the internet, the trio began their search, their quest, during the spring of 2013. This is the story of their Rutherford County, North Carolina, red-dirt road to discovery, a journey that includes many warm recollections and nostalgic photographs, taking us all back to a slower and simpler time.