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Thursday, December 3, 2009

Our Heritage..Their Legacy.....

If you have ever wondered about your Butler ancestors, I hope to answer some of your questions here. I can tell you they were part of the American Story and the American Dream. I found many heroes in their ranks. The first were no doubt fearless as they carved out a home in the North Georgia wilderness of 1785. Leaving their home in Virginia to claim free land that they received for their service in the American Revolution, our ggggreat grandfather, Zachariah Butler along with his sons, James, Patrick, Nathaniel, and Joel and their wives and children, followed the trail as many others did to start anew on lands taken from the Creeks and Cherokees.
The decisions they made and the lives they led affected their children and ultimately us also. All their courage as well as their frailties are part of us today. In the same way our lives will affect our posterity. This is an enormous responsibility that I did not fully appreciate until recently.
May you learn something about yourself from the stories here. Scroll all the way down to start at the beginning. Read each entry in order. Our Butler story in America begins in Virginia. The long journey from 1736 to 2009 is filled with adventure, family bonds, hard work and also tragedy and grief. Some of us have served in every major conflict. We survived Native American hostility, disease, war, economic depression and civil unrest. Most of us lived in the South during the hardship of disastrous civil war and tremendous change. We are here today with all the spunk, hope, courage and mistakes of the past behind us. The future awaits each of us and our descendants. May our legacy be what the next generation deserves. Lydia Butler Anderson December ,2009.