Excerpt from A History of the Kagy Relationship: In American, From 1715 to 1900 I have heard it said that almost any one who would go to work with a determination to succeed could trace the history of his ancestry for at least five generations with tolerable accuracy. In some cases this may be true, but its certainty is not true in all cases. There may be no difficulty in most instances in going back to our grandfathers, for they were dead before our time, their children or other relatives who were cotemporary with them can tell us something of his personal appearance, his manners, habits and peculiarities. But when we try to learn something of his ancestors, whose history is unwritten, then the difficulty thickens and we are content if we are able to get the merest glimpses of their career or even an unimportant incident in their life. Even this is often difficult to accomplish, as all who lived in their day have passed away. In old countries the difficulty is not near so great as it is in a new country like this, where families have become so widely separated that in time they became entirely unknown to each other, and were as widely separated in feeling and they were by distance. It is a lamentable fact that in our family brothers do not know where each other are - all human experience and observation shows that long separation or communication leads to estrangement and forgetfulness, and finally to total indifference. Young people rarely feel much interest in tracing their family history. It is only when the evening shadows begin to appear that they feel like trying to trace the long line of ancestry which has preceded them; how, when and where they lived, and what they did and when they died. It is unfortunate that this is the case, as sources of information which are available at one period of our lives are not so at another, and thus valuable data is forever lost. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."