About the family tree . . .
The seeds for this project were planted decades ago in a warm country kitchen as a young lad listened to the fascinating tales and reminiscences of family elders gathered around the table. Later came some scribbles in a notebook, then copies of an uncle's diligently compiled paper records, then miles of travel and hours of poking through family scrapbooks, shoeboxes of photos, public library records and official documents.
This site held 630 individual web pages when the family tree was first uploaded in March of 2004. That number grows with frequent updates as paper records are translated into digital form and as new entries are discovered or contributed. Each Web page shows the individual (or individual and spouse or partner) with parents and children. If any information about the parents and/or the children is on this site, the page will link to them.
In some instances, nothing more than the name of a parent or child is known. In those cases, no individual page is linked. Sometimes, information about an individual is scanty — just a date or a place or the name of a spouse — but the individual's page is presented, anyway, as it might offer clues to someone researching family ties.
Frequently, names are not linked because the branch would lead far from the main stem of the Bragg family tree, beyond the purview of this Website. But these "dead" links often are very much alive on other family tree sites; use the internet's search engines to look for live links to these individuals.
In many cases, a name is not linked because research is proceeding and/or the available information and notes are not yet transcribed into browser-friendly format. The author is working steadily at these loose ends, as you can see by the Version History on this page.
So, please come back occasionally to check for new information. Unlike printed reports, the online family tree can change from day to day, even hour to hour.
About privacy . . .
The goal has been to present as much information as practical, even about living members of the family. Some genealogy sites omit almost all information about living persons.
Here, instead, we choose to maintain a reasonable shield of privacy for living family members while communicating some information about who they are and whence they came. For example, the birthdates of living persons are partially screened to obscure the exact year of birth, but the month and day are presented, if known. This information can benefit researchers, but is of no use to haters or swindlers.
About liberty . . .
The internet is a marvelous concept, a brilliant application of technology and certainly one of humankind's greatest cooperative ventures since ancient times. In just a few years the internet has linked ordinary people to each other in ways our parents could not have imagined. In America, the internet has enabled a regrowth of community discourse within a society that has become increasingly fragmented.
We have a responsibility to future generations to strengthen this human connection and to keep the internet as free as possible from intrusion by the inevitable profiteers, puritans and fear-mongers. The unimpeded flow of uncensored information and ideas is a uniquely precious liberty. We must defend and preserve it.
