Authorities

aunt minerva collection
The Foster Family by W.T. Foster, cont.



***AUTHORITIES
I will not try to give all the authoritis for each statement that I will make but will mention here a few that I have carefully studied, all of which may be found in the libraries. The most extensive authority I have found is Pierce's Genealogy of the Foster Family. That is a very large work consisting of 1100 very large printed pages. I prepared the article found at page 688 of that work, but Mr. Pierce, tho he was a very able and sincere genealogist, got my family wrongly connected. He gives the name of the father of my great grand-father as John Foster which I believe to be correct, but he got the wrong John Foster and therefore makes him a Tory during the Revolutionary WAr. I have positive evidence that the home of my great-great grandfather John Foster was in North Carolina during the Revolution and that he was in Washington's Army. A letter from Mrs. William F. Thornton, a descendant of Alexander Foster, makes that statement.
But the Pierce Genealogy of the Fosters contains an immense amount of correct history. That work contains the names of 10,000 descendants of the Fosters and a correct list of our ancestors, covering 915 years from the year 800 to 1715. Mr Volney W Foster of Evansville, Ill., having ample means, paid all the immense expenses of compiling that book and I paid $10.00 for a copy of it. It gives an excellent account of the American Fosters who came from England to America before the year 1728 but a rather poor account of the Scotch-Irish branch to which I belong. That book conclusively proves that Anacher, the Danish Nobleman, the "Sea King", the Norman, who about 800 A.D. conquered what is now Belguim, Holland, part of the Netherlands and four other provinces, now in Germany and France, was the ancestor of all the Fosters that have ever lived in the whole world and there are now not less than five hundred thousand of the relatives living.
The encyclopedias furnish another source of much information about our family and about the various nationalities, races, tribes, and peoples to which they have belonged. I have particularly studied the British, Britanica, Everybody's, Chamber's, The American Standard, the Peoples and Aldens Manifold. The seven volumes of Danish history are very useful and the English histories of William the Conquerer are very important. The Fall of Rome gives a complete account of the part taken in that long drawn out event by our ancestor who was a great general and a great admiral. Of course the histories of Flanders must be carefully studied as our ancestors conquered that country, organized Flanders and governed it for 266 years. Our Foster relatives governed Flanders for 240 years more. The Histories of England, Scotland, and Ireland have many accounts of our family from 1066 to 1730 and the American Histories begin references to our family about 1640.
Of course the records of the Revolutionary War are important. Of these I have many reports from the Archives of Richmond, Virginia, the Congressional Library at Washington, the U.S.Pension office and the state archives of Kentucky at Cynthiana, Lexington, Louisville and this Kentucky state history is important.