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A grass roots approach to identifying your roots. 

      How many of you have ever wondered where your family was during the American Civil War or the American Revolution.  I am now 37 years old and over the last few years seen my grandparents generation start to dwindle.  They are all in their 80’s or better and they experienced life as it can never be experienced before.  I use to sit and listen to the stories of World War II or the Civilian Conservation Corps.  My Father worked the Presidential Yachts under Eisenhower and Kennedy.  I can’t come close to having experienced anything like that, except through their stories. 

        About 4 years ago the curiosity got the best of me and I began digging up my roots.  I had never done this before and had no clue where to start. Before long I found myself spending hours in the one place you would have only caught me in dead as a teenager, the Library.  I found it fascinating and a bit addictive.  I began to interview ALL of the relatives I could find, digging through their old bibles and scrapbooks.  It’s amazing how interested you become in history classes and civil war documentaries. 

            It took a while to build the link into Germany and I first could only observe a trend.  Everywhere I traced my family to followed large German settlements.  But first came the tie in with the name change.  There are two prevailing stories; first and foremost was that a teacher told them they spelt their name wrong.  The other came right out of the Hatfields and McCoys, a family feud had split the clan so deeply that they changed their name to separate themselves.

It was easy to identify the time of the name change.  I quickly found the family in the census records and requested birth certificates of all by dad’s uncles and aunts, as well as my uncle’s and aunts.  It was there in the census records that I found proof of when my family settled in North East Arkansas and where they had come to Arkansas from.

The most significant of these discoveries was the name change.  Records indicated that the Rickard name was of English Ancestry and Rikard was the Anglicized version after the Germans settled in America. There is also a French version, Ricard.  Knowing the nationality is very important when narrowing down your research to a manageable level.

All of the hard work has paid great rewards and I  have my Rickard line traced back to 1641 in Wurtemberg Germany and my Tripod line back to about 1700 in Switzerland.  Now is my time to return many of the favors that people have done for me and that is the purpose of this site.

Hope you enjoy your stay.