The book that started it all...

Well, actually it was a couple of books. When I was a kid I knew absolutely nothing about my family history. There were no cool stories about how my Great Great Grandfather forged his way across the country to tame the west, or how my great great grandmother married a fur trapper on the Oregon trail. None of that sort of thing. In fact, my dad didn't know much, and my grandpa wasn't around much, and even if I wanted to ask him, I was told that he didn't talk much about his family. Had a falling out as it were. I remember my Great Grandmother on my dads side from when I was a little kid, but I don't remember if she would have told me anything about our family history. You see, she was the ticket the whole time.

As I grew up, my last name was something I hated. Kids would rhyme it with things and make fun of me for having a name that was a common word in the English language. As I got older that got better and I started to wonder why the only Few's in the world were only the ones that I lived around or that I was closely related to. We would check phonebooks for fun when we visited a new state or city. No Fews were to be found. As technology advanced, I would "Google" myself and other Josh Few's would appear in my searches. Eventually Facebook became a thing and I found there were not so Few of us around!

Ancestry.com was not so helpful to start out as I only knew as far back as my Great Grandmother, and I didn't know her first husband who was a Few. My Grandpa moved to Montana and the same area which allowed me to have frequent visits. Eventually I started asking him about the family and he gave me a family Bible which his mother had given to him. As many Bibles do, it contained a short family tree that started with my Grandpa and went back 4-5 generations. I plugged these into Ancestry and the rest is history. I found that the first Few's recorded were back in 1500's England near Wiltshire. There are several different spellings for Few which include Ffew, Phew ("ph" sounding like ffff), and the first time it was spelled in the New World was on a land map record of First Purchasers from William Penn's Administration where it was spelled "Fue." This made finding information difficult.

In my research, I kept finding references to a book written in the 1970's called "Some Descendants of Richard Few of Chester County, Pennsylvania and Allied Lines" by Florence Knight Fruth.

I wanted to find this book. It took me many years, I searched everywhere. There were only 1000 copies ever published, and most of those were printed for the Few family, and no one was letting go of them. I decided one day to plug it in to Amazon (something I had done before many times) and low and behold there was a listing for one that a library in Ohio was selling for $300! That was a bit steep, but it was the only one I had ever seen for sale. I emailed the seller and explained that I was from the Few family and wished to purchase the book, but if they could only reduce the price. They replied back and said they would reduce the price to $150 dollars. I purchased it on the spot. It is #27 out of 1000 and it is signed by the author to someone who I believe was a female descendent of the Few clan. My guess is that it was a part of an estate sale and the books ended up at the library. To my benefit! I read through the book and found out many of the same, but many new things on top of my research.

We will be exploring many of the things I found along the way on our trip. We fly into Boston, MA this evening. I hope to be making a post on each day's adventures, so feel free to check back!