First of all, I owe a great debt to my grandfather Demus C. Kizer who in 1968 sparked my interest in genealogy by sharing his stories about growing up in rural Arkansas during the early 1900s.  I was 11 years old at the time, and was fascinated hearing about all of the different families and how they were connected.  I immediately started writing to my Kizer relatives, sent away for census records and Civil War pension files and have kept going ever since.

Grandpa Demus's maternal grandmother was Thurza Malinda (Shaver) Kizer. When I started researching my Shaver ancestry in 1971, I lived in San Jose, Santa Clara County, California. From Grandpa, I learned of a Shaver relative, also living in San Jose, named Mary Alice Hamm. Alice (age 70, a retired high school teacher, living with her elderly mother and aunt) was an absolutely wonderful person. She was delighted to find a teenaged boy so interested in genealogy, and she eagerly shared the research she had done on her Shaver family during the previous 40-50 years! Among her findings was a letter from her great-aunt, dated 1923, that stated "Jacob Shaver was my father and married Thirza Moss. And my father's mother's maiden name was Blackwelder." Other records showed that Jacob Shaver (my 3rd-great-grandfather) was born in 1792 in what is now Cabarrus County, North Carolina. His mother Mary (Blackwelder) Shaver was believed to be a daughter of John Adam Blackwelder, who came to America in 1738 with his family.

Alice corresponded with others during the 1940s and 1950s who were researching the Blackwelder (and Schwarzwalder) ancestry, including Deward C. Williams, who published several books on the Blackwelder and allied families in the 1960s. Alice Hamm, her mother, and aunt made several trips to Germany to visit the ancestral home of the Schwarzwalder family in Durrn, Monchweiler, and St. Georgen in the Black Forest. While there, she took a large number of photographs and photocopied many of the parish records relating to this family. When I met Alice in 1971, she loaned me her copy of D. C. Williams' comprehensive book The Blackwelder and Allied Families of North Carolina and Illinois, which was published in 1963. That allowed me to trace my ancestry back to around 1600 in Germany.

In the early 1980s (after I had moved to Bakersfield, Kern County, California), I kept in touch with Alice and visited her in San Jose frequently. I had done quite a bit of work in the 1970s and early 1980s on the descendants of Jacob Shaver (son of Mary Blackwelder). Around 1982, Alice introduced me to a distant Shaver relative named W. Cary Anderson, then a college professor in the South American country of Colombia. Cary was planning to write a genealogy of the Shaver family, tracing back to that family's German origins. In the book that resulted (in 1983), The Ancestry and Descendants of John Shaver 1745-1835, a lot of the Blackwelder and Schwarzwalder research of Alice Hamm, D. C. Williams, and others was included.

During the next 17 years, I continued genealogical research on a number of my other ancestral lines and starting publishing my work on the Internet in the form of web sites in the late 1990s. Even though I moved to North Carolina in 1990 (where I currently live), I didn't resume any Blackwelder research until around July 2000. Although I don't have a copy of D. C. Williams' fine work on the Blackwelder family, I was inspired by rereading Cary Anderson's book on the Shavers and decided to try to put together a web site devoted to the family of John Blackwelder and his wife Elisabetha Maushardt.

The State Archives of North Carolina is located in Raleigh (about 15 miles from my home in Cary) and is a tremendous resource for genealogical research in this state. Also, Cabarrus County (the original North Carolina home of the Blackwelder family) is about 120 miles away and my job takes me to that part of the state quite often. The advent of the Internet and various records repositories like www.ancestry.com has made a tremendous difference in helping researchers find each other, collaborate, and share information. Fellow Blackwelder researchers like Susan Grills and Greg Matthews have made significant contributions to this project.

This Blackwelder web page would not have been possible without the contribution of dozens of researchers over many years.  During my 39+ years of research, I have tried to carefully document the primary sources of each piece of information in my database in order to validate the extensive research done by myself and many others.  I continue to be amazed and gratified at the sense of teamwork displayed by other genealogists I have met.  Hopefully this compilation will help others now and in the future to carry on the work that has been done so far.
 

 Mark B. Arslan