Today, some 18 months after our first tentative forays onto the World Wide Web, and after uncounted hours of research and writing and transcribing and formatting, this site has evolved into something resembling a tree — with a thick sturdy trunk sprouting lots of thick branches and roots, with each branch and root branching endlessly, as tree-parts do.  And at the tip of each twig and rootlet an unfinished story. 

     So far there's over 3 gigabytes of information on over 200 pages housing over 8,000 digital images, including several thousand original photographs, more than 17,000 files, and nearly 20,000 hyperlinks.  We've consulted most every type of evidence there is — censuses, newspapers, tax records, court documents, church registries, vital certificates, land records, pension papers, government reports, oral histories, folklore, industrial archaeology, published materials — you name it, we've probably looked at it.  Still, as much as we've learned — and it's a fair amount — we're discovering new things every day.  There really does seem to be no end to it.

     At the core of the site — its trunk — are the Documents Pages.  Everything worth finding here can be found through the Documents Home and its sidekick, the Contents page.  So far our research has focused on two main branches:  the one leading back in time from Betty Delehanty to Genevieve Sullivan to Jennie Lang to Nellie Kinsman, and the other the branch beginning with the Delehanty who gave Betty and Genevieve their names:  John Delehanty, and his family and community in the Vermont-New York slate districts.  The pages on John Delehanty, in fact, have evolved into a second website, embedded within this one — Mike's West Castleton Journal.  There's also a fair amount of material on other lines like Schroeder-Kaddatz in St Paul, Amons-Van Arman-Pollard in Wisconsin, Sullivan in Maine — not to mention Bleau dit Rossignal-Bottineau-Baldwin in Minnesota.

     Our investigations span more than a dozen states — including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maine, Idaho, Montana, Alabama, the Dakotas, and Washington — and extend to Canada, Ireland, Germany, France, and Holland.  We've learned things we couldn't have imagined when we first started out — like the role of purple mill-stock slate in shaping John Delehanty's life, or the role of the Red River Ojibwe-Métis in shaping Nellie's.

     Readers should know that unfinished pages abound.  Some pages are more polished.  Others less.  It is a workspace.

     Please be in touch if you have any questions, comments, or something to contribute.  You can reach us at mjsch313@yahoo.com.  Please be sure to put something in the subject line identifying your missive as legitimate, otherwise we're likely to delete it as spam.

     Thanks for listening, and we hope you enjoy the site a mite as much as we've enjoyed building it.

   This site is dedicated to the memory of

Genevieve Sullivan Delehanty

and

Betty Jane Delehanty Schroeder