This site is brought to you by the Gleaves Family Association and has been put together to help compile information about the Gleaves genealogy, as well as to provide information about upcoming reunions, links to other Gleaves sites, discussion and forums as well as a gallery of Gleaves past and present.

The Gleaves Family Association hopes YOU will be with us in Wytheville, Wythe County, Virginia, at our next reunion!  More details to follow after the first of the New Year.

From Owen Gleaves:

This picture came out in the Mt. Juliet News this past week. It shows the First Public School built about 1878 on Juliet Gleaves' property.  Her property at that time was considered the town center.  With the arrival of the railroad, community activities moved about a half mile north to the railroad. We refer to it as moving down to the railroad due to her property being on a hill.

This picture is of the east side of the school and shows the school water well.  The well was an old pump type that you had to pump a lever up and down to get the water. I remember them when I was a child (tells how old I really am). You were lucky to get more than a cup or two from each pump of the lever.  Rufus Page, a friend of ours, had one rigged up in a old galvanized washing tub at his annual Mt. Juliet Home Coming just a few weeks ago.
 
Juliet Gleaves was married to Guy Trigg Gleaves, a son of Absalom Gleaves.  The Gleaves have been around Mt. Juliet a long, long time. No one has ran us out of town yet. Think I will hang around just a few more years.

Not only have the letter images been improved (see below), but now all of the letter images have been loaded to the web site! Over 1200 documents and many with multiple images!

We recently received a contact from someone researching the Rutherford family.  He had this to say about these letters:

"Definitely, these letters are a geneaological goldmine.
Rutherford is very important to my research. His letters on your website reveal information about him that can be found nowhere else. Even his testimony in the 30+ court cases in which he was a defendant or plaintiff do not shed much light on his personal life. These letters are extremely valuable because they do just that! Unfortunately, there are no sizeable collections of KY slave traders' family papers in public archives, as there are for other states (such as the Rice Ballard Papers for Virginia). That makes it all the more worthwhile when a collection such as this becomes available to the public."

These letters provide us an opportunity to learn about the personal lives of our ancestors, what they saw and what they felt and what kind of people they were.

Enjoy!

When viewing the family letters, you see an image of the letter in a resolution size called Small Web View.  This resolution is too small to be able to really read the letter.  When you click on this image, a larger image will open in another window.  Previously the resolution size used for this window was the Large Web View.  This was still not satisfactory to be able to really read the letter.  All of the large web views have been replaced with the original scans of the letters.  Now you can actually read the letters on the web site.  In addition if you click on this image, the image will increase to a hugh size so you can now really see the detail in the letter.

In the past if you wanted to help in transcribing the letters, you needed to contact the webmaster who would send you a CD that contained the original scans.  Now you can actually transcribe from the web site.  When you see a letter that you would like to transcribe that has no name in the 'transcribed by' field, enter the verbiage into a text document and save it.  Then send the document as an attachment using your email program and enter this address into the email send to area:  WebMaster@GleavesFamily.com.  If it is easier for you to key the text directly into the email message area, that will also work.

Some helpful hints in transcribing a letter:

• Don't worry about the letter being perfect.  If you cannot read a word, then leave it blank or use a ? there.  The webmaster will review it and enter the word if it can be determined
• Very little modern punctuation is used in these letters.  Use what you think necessary to convey the meaning.  Quite often there are no periods at the end of sentences.  To follow the letter writer's lead, just leave several spaces before beginning the next sentence.
• You may use the writer's spelling when transcribing a letter.  This will give a better feel to the reader about the letter wirter.
• The software that loads the letters does not allow any formatting to speak of, i.e. no tabs, no indentions, etc.  So keep it simple and start each new section at the left margin.  
• Have FUN!  and thanks for the help.

Use the Contact page to reach us if you have any comments or questions about this rich family treasure. 

Family obituaries are now being added to the Family History page.

When you have a new obituary (including those from the past) that you would like added, please use the Contact page to send it to us.

Paula Poll, our cousin who lives in Venice, California, has a new passion...providing a habitat in her garden for the endangered Monarch Butterfly.  To read more about her story and see her photos, click here for the Gleaves Family Pages.

If you have a story and/or photographies that you would like to share with the family, then use the Contact page to let us know about it.

This content has been moved to the Gleaves Family Page which can be found by clicking here.