Dedicated to the Descendants of Philander and Thurza McCarter
In 1987 a distant cousin, Connie McCarter, wrote to our family in Boise and asked if we belonged to the long-lost Idaho branch of the family. She had been tracing all of the descendants of Philander and Thurza (Williams) McCarter of Grayson County, Virginia and wondered if we were related to their son, Hugh Franklin McCarter, who had set out for Idaho Territory in the late 1880s. When we told her that we were descendants of H.F., she kindly shared her research with us, and so our obsession with genealogy began.
On these pages you will find almost all of our family research of the last 25 years. It's been a collaborative effort of immediate family, distant cousins, friends, and complete strangers who were kind enough to share their photos, stories, and records. We hope you enjoy this site and come back often.
150th Anniversary of the Civil War
Four of our grandfathers and numerous uncles served in the Civil War. As many genealogical and historical sites commemorate this anniversary, we'd like to leave you with the speech President Lincoln delivered November 19, 1863 at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.