This multi-generational project builds on the labors of love collected by my forebearers over hundreds of years and passed down on all three sides of the family.

Here I share, for future generations and anyone else who might be interested, the decades long research into the history of my family and the stories I have uncovered along the way.

THE ALLENS

THE FRIESENS

THE BONDS

WORLD AND FAMILY TIMELINES – links to side-by-side timelines inspired by Nancy Ellen Allen Haeger and adapted by Ruth Alice Allen Carothers for the three families.

If I live long enough and maintain my mental faculties long enough to complete this immense project I have undertaken, I hope to have taken the lineage as far back as I can on the side of my father (Lambeth Shelton Allen), my mother (Arline Catherine Friesen), and my stepmother (Dorothy Marie Bond, who loved me and my three siblings as much as if we had been born to her, even after the birth of her own son, our youngest brother). Click on the links above to access one particular family and see how much I have accomplished towards my project completion. I started this wordpress site in January 2025 with THE ALLENS and will move down the lines as each is complete, so the closer it is to 2025, there may not be as much information in THE FRIESENS or THE BONDS.

The perfectionist in me would like this project to be error free, but the realist in me knows that impossibility of that vision. Please forgive any typos or errors, and know I do strive to be as accurate as I possibly can, using as many references and supporting documents as I can. My family tree on Ancestry.com is Carothers/Allen Family Tree.

My hope is that this information will survive and be available for many generations to come. Research now, with websites like Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com, is so much easier than it was when my Aunt Nancy Ellen Allen Haeger was putting together her family project in the early 2000s, and immensely easier than it was when my great grand uncle Joseph Bensin Allen used a newsletter, The Troy Record, in the early 1900s to attempt to collect family data from the descendants of his four great grandfathers. I can only imagine the information and ease of access to it that will be available in the next century, but I hope that what I have collected here will be available to help a family historian in the future.