The Pemberton Family World Wide

Open Invitation to Join the Pemberton Family World Wide

The officers and members of the Pemberton Family World Wide association invite you to join in its exciting work. Here's what's happening:

Our Vision

You have used Plan A (seach the indexes, ancestry.com, census, etc, etc.) and sooner or later you hit your brick wall. Then you go to Plan B: search the unindexed sources: wills, tax records, local libraries, etc. That's what the Pemberton Family World Wide association is about. It's a World Class, top notch, Plan B facility. Example: There are 151 wills in the Chester Record Office, as of this writing, there are already more than 50 registrants on this (PFWW) website. If each one transcribed 3 wills all of us could all have them to hand. (A few of them are done already.) The point is we can all cooperate and make much faster progress working together than alone. If you are looking for a Plan A site like ancestry.com, this isn't it: not yet. Right now the PFWW is all about making Plan B efficient and fun. And there are a lot more ways than just cooperation - we have a range of initiatives going so, well - read on -- [The picture is Pemberton Castle, Austin, Texas. Permission of the Pemberton Heights Neighborhood Association.]

What's Already Done

1. A core group of volunteers has formed an Executive Committee under the Consitution and By-Laws.
2. We have launched a one-name study that has gathered thousands of Pemberton events from the earliest Parish Registers in Cheshire. Lancashire is probably next.
3. We have launched a Pemberton DNA Project with samples in, more coming, and one from Cheshire, UK. We have a DNA General Fund to assist in gathering samples.
4. We have launched a Cheshire Wills Extraction Project that is transcribing 151 Pemberton wills and publishing them on this website. A few are comleted already.
5. We have launched a private Pemberton Genealogy Storehouse which contains a few Pemberton pedigrees and over a thousand parish register extractions in a wonderful search environment.
6. Established a website with over 70 web pages dealing with the facilities, techniques, membership, collaboration, Pemberton Origins, Heraldry, published pedigree errors, details of extractions and DNA projects, etc etc.
7. Opened a dialogue with the College of Arms, London, to explore the possibility of obtaining an official coat of arms for the PFWW
8. Made arrangements to purchase a copy of the famous Pemberton Pedigrees book, (Sidney Press, 1923) to make it available to all members
9. Created an internal (not linked to any outside) social network that makes it easy to find other members who are working on your line and to create a personal research group with its own forum, album, bulletins, and mass email.

How It Works

• Reseachers all over the world have been working on their Pemberton lines.
• Almost everyone has hit their "brick wall". Is that inevitable?·
• We say "Yes, BUT only temporarily. There are ways: break them down, circumvent them, burrow under or even attack from the back side. Here's how:

1. Break the wall down: Find new sources of information - from our experts, from new collaborators, from links on the PFWW website.
2. Circumvent: Find a collateral line and help trace it back to a common ancestor.
3. Burrow under: Use DNA to find people in the same line or close branch who already have a documented pedigree. (DNA can also seperate unrelated Pemberton lines that lie on top of one another in the records.)
4. Attack from the back side: It's like a giant puzzle. When we get stuck, we help the puzzler close by to fill in the gaps between. We use up available pieces until the final solution is forced to appear.

We think you will find that all those methods have been addressed in the Pemberton Family World Wide. So now is a good time to collaborate at a new level, to bring all our records to the Pemberton Genealogy storehouse, find someone who is working on our line, make some new friends and have some fun filling out the world wide Pemberton puzzle. We hope you will register a new account with us, take a look around and then join by paying the small membership dues.

What Is Next

1. Continue the membership drive, invite all members to invite every Pemberton they know
2. Take polls of the members to discover where we should focus our efforts
3. Encourage members to fill out their profiles so we can find one another on this website.
4. Set up teams and go to work transcribing and publishing Will, Deeds, etc
5. Data from these transcriptions to into the Genealogy Storehouse where they are easily searched and GEDCOM files of search results can be downloaded
6. Set up our first Reunions - We are requesting Coca-Cola to sponsor our first reunion at their Pemberton Place facilities in Atlanta, and a place in Cheshire, UK for simultaneous reunions.

A Summary of Facilities and Assests of the Pemberton Family World Wide (See Below)

But first a little context - a big world view --

The Pemberton Picture Puzzle

The Pemberton Family World Wide is a huge picture puzzle with each individual a piece linked to the other pieces by parent, child, sibling and marriage connectors. ·There are many, many of us working on the portion of the Pemberton Family World Wide tree closest to us. These are the scenes of the puzzle. We each assemble the house, or fence, or in this case, the tree that we live in. We each paw through the pile of pieces we see in the historic records looking for that piece that connects to the ones we have already assembled. This is like putting together that blue sky where all the pieces have the same Pemberton colour: they are both tantalizing and daunting; they are all Pemberton so we "know they fit somewhere".

The Goal is to Protect and Assist 

Our goal is to assist as much as time and technology will allow in putting together this big family picture puzzle and to get acquainted and have fun while we are doing it.

At the same time, our goal is to protect the portions of the puzzle that have already been assembled from people whose casual approach to genealogy has given rise to thousands of "junk genealogies" so often seen on the internet. For that reason, this information is available only to certified members of the Pemberton Family World Wide.

We are all keen to see if we can join any of our scenes together, and we all have "brick walls" so it just seems natural that we should work together and begin joining our separate scenes into the big Pemberton picture puzzle that we know is waiting for us to assemble and enjoy.

Collaboration Means Success

Our best hopes lie in three areas:
1) If we can put together everything we can, including branches where no one is doing or has done any work, that will take all those pieces of the puzzle out of circulation and by this process of elimination make it easier for each researcher to identify the people who can be correctly attached to the scene of the puzzle they are working on, and

2) Because Pemberton was a place name before it was a surname, there are several Pemberton families that are more or less unrelated (by blood as we say) but came by their surname as a result of their residence in or near Pemberton, Wigan, Lancashire, England. These families each have their own individual world wide puzzle. But, now they lie like transparent layers on top of one another in the historical landscape of time and place, so they present a challenge to the researcher because they look like near cousins, while in many cases they are not closely related. DNA is helping us separate these layers and disentangle the historical data. It is an exciting time to be doing family history. The few tests we have gathered have proven the value of DNA. We only need a few more samples before we can infer the DNA profile of one of our common ancestors.

3) Collaboration will make us all better researchers and better friends. Together we can be efficiently organised and divide up the work and have more fun doing it. We can minimise duplication of effort, maximise success, encourage one another when things go wrong and share techniques and sources.

Welcome to Fun While You Work

It is to these ends that the Pemberton Family World Wide association has been established. We hope you will join us in this exciting adventure so fraught with the rich tapestries of life: love, work, joy and sorrow, peace and conflict, success and disappointment. Take a look around the website. There are facilities to assist in connecting with other Pembertons waiting to get acquainted with you. (Where better in the world could a Pemberton look for a friend than among those of similar goals, beliefs, and talents - to say nothing of similar traits like the famous "Pemberton nose".)·Here you will find helps for sponsoring reunions, research, and for building family unity in your own household - a place where you can put your treasured family archives that is not at the mercy of business pressures, and where you can share your memories with others who will appreciate them more than anyone else. We hope you will decide to move in and stay and get acquainted with your relatives. There can be no better way to get to know yourself than to become familiar with your family. Perhaps you will want to become an officer or committee chair and see to the proper advancement of all things Pemberton. The past and future are waiting --

Facilities of the Pemberton Family World Wide

There are a number of successful family associations with large memberships. The PFWW is patterned after these. Here is a partial list of facilities that are offered to members of the Pemberton Family World Wide:

• All Pemberton pedigrees can be "laid out side by side" in one place for easy access and study
• Your data is protected behind a security wall so that it cannot be "hijacked" and be melded into someone's "junk genealogy"
• Your data can be available to other trusted Pemberton researchers or you can choose to keep it private
• Tools are available for testing genealogical data for consistency and validity
• A methodology is presented for breaking down, circumventing or burrowing under brick walls
• A social network, a la facebook®, makes collaboration and friendship a unified activity (there is no connection, electronic or otherwise to facebook®)
• You and your collaborators can create your own research group with its own forum, photo album, bulletin board, and mass mailing
• When you join you list the Christian names in your Pemberton line in order: that list can be searched by other members
• You can also list the time and place where your research is focused: this becomes available for all members to search
• An active DNA project identifies major family branches and separates multiple origins of Pemberton families, helps separate real cousins from apparent cousins
• A forum facilitates reunions and social gatherings sponsored by members or the PFWW
• A forum facilitates collaboration among researchers and mentoring of beginners
• A periodical PFWW Newsletter keeps members up to date on new developments, ideas, and opportunities
• An on-going Pemberton One-Name study provides a unified data source for the majority of early Pemberton events
• Member archives are stored by a family association rather than a business subject to market pressures
• A central location accumulates and publishes known common errors in Pemberton pedigrees
• Members can easilly become editors so they can publish their own information on the PFWW website
• A Constitution and By-Laws provides needed structure and confidence in the viability and longevity of the association
• Annual elections of officers provides for member control of the association
• All volunteer staff protects value of membership dues
• Open accounting protects the financial assets of the association
• Active Social, Publicity, Programme and Membership committees keep the whole machine well-oiled and moving forward
• Appointed Historians, Genealogists and Technologists provide professional grade guidance and insure quality