My Deen family tree began with a letter from our great grand aunt Vernie to my grandmother Relinda, detailing the Deen family tree and identifying her grandparents Benjamin James Deen and Sophronia Fordice who had been born in the early 19th century.  This letter defined the two families that joined and began our line in the United States.  We were told of a Deen relative who had fought in the Revolution, so we knew that Benjamin James was not the first Deen in America.

Online research led to email correspondence with distant cousins who are also family genealogists.  This in turn revealed Benjamin James’s father, Enos, and Enos’s brothers Samuel, James, John and Enoch.  It also revealed the grandfather and grandmother, Benjamin and Lucretia. 

This database is indebted to family researchers who contributed to the projects both in information and more importantly field visits and photographs.  Special thanks to cousins Darlene Ross, Sarah Jayne Severs, Jerry Neville, J.B. Loveland, Sara McGrath, Llyodean Allen and Betty Wingate among others.

And most of all to the best source for Deen family research, James Russell Deen who since the 1940s corresponded with family members all over the country and compiled extensive notes on the family going back hundreds of years.  I had the pleasure of meeting “Russ” and his wife Regina when they were both in their early 90’s.  I would drive to their house and Russ and I would go through boxes covering forty or fifty years of correspondence and notes.  Eventually Russ gave me the bulk of his notes and I have slowly been transcribing them - along with the notes from other cousins - into this GED database.

As with a family a database is a living thing.  I have added wikipedia links where appropriate, and will be adding photographs and maps as time avails itself.  If you find a mistake or have a name to add please feel free to contact me.  Be assured that while everyone is here, I keep all information on the current generations strictly private. 

click here to enter the database

all contents copyright 2008s