Background

As a kid growing up in the Appalachian region of southern Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s, it was part of my family's folklore that we were related to William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Even though that possible historical connection fascinated me in my younger years, I had no idea how to go about trying to find out if it was true. Fortunately, the desire to some day investigate that connection never left me.

After I graduated from college in the early 1970s, I became an avid bicyclist. One of the forms of bicycling to which I was most attracted was cycle camping, a self-supported form of bicycle travel where everything one needs – tent, sleeping bag, cooking equipment, food, bike repair items, etc. – is carried on the bike.

By the early 1980s, I was looking for an extended bicycling adventure so I thought I would pay homage to my supposed ancestor and ride as close as possible to the (mostly water) route that Lewis and Clark traveled in 1803. The route that I scouted out went from St Louis, Missouri to Astoria, Oregon through a total of 121 counties in 12 states. I estimated it would take around 3 months to complete so I was planning to do the tour during the summer of 1983.

I had mentioned my tour plans to a co-worker at the time named Bruce Alexander. Bruce was impressed with my plan and casually mentioned it to his brother, George. George was a photographer for National Geographic and recognized this would make a good story for the magazine. So George told his colleagues on the magazine's staff about it.

National Geographic reached out to me with an offer to sponsor my bicycle tour in exchange for the rights to publish a feature story in the magazine sometime in 1983 or 1984 to coincide with the 180^th anniversary of Corps of Discovery expedition. Since I was a descendent of William Clark, they wanted to show that the spirit of adventure was still alive in the Clark family 180 years later.

This adventure of mine had now taken on a whole different level of seriousness so I needed to move beyond family rumor and get more definitive proof that I was indeed related to William Clark. I reached out to one of my cousins who was the de facto family genealogist for that proof. When I told him about my National Geographic offer and my need for verifiable proof of the relationship, he became somewhat nervous, equivocated on what proof he actually had, and downplayed the potential connection.

This was quite disconcerting to me to say the least. Rather than continue with the bike tour under a cloud of doubt and potentially false genealogical circumstances, I told National Geographic that I was cancelling my Lewis and Clark tour.

However, this event back in the early 1980s put me on a lifelong quest to understand more about my family heritage. The first three decades of genealogical research (1980s thru 2000s) progressed very slowly due to the demands of my career and raising a family.

However, now that I am in my fourth decade of research in genealogy, I have become much more engaged in the effort for a number of reasons:

• I am now older and, as is often the case with age, I have acquired a greater interest in my family origins.
• I am retired and have more time to put into this effort.
• I now live in the Washington DC area and have access to many more resources than ever before:
  • National Archives,
  • Library of Congress,
  • Smithsonian Museum of American History,
  • Washington DC Family History Center,
  • New England Historical and Genealogical Society (Boston),
  • workshops, such as the one given regularly at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at American University, and
  • an abundance of local genealogical societies in the Washington DC metro area.

After all of these years of research into my family history, I now know the answer about my relationship to William Clark. Even though I am not a direct descendent of William Clark, he is my 5^th great uncle, along with his older brother, George Rogers Clark the general of Revolutionary War fame in the Northwest Territory. The details of this relationship can be found in my Clark Family Tree.

I still haven't done that bicycle tour and I'm not sure I ever will. I am now over 70 years old and still an avid cyclist, but a 3,500 mile bike tour from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean doesn't interest me like it did at age 33.

However, the route that I scouted out in the early 1980s across 12 states turned out to be very close to the Lewis & Clark Bicycle Trail . Adventure Cycling created this route in 2003 for the 200^th anniversary of the Corps of Discovery. I think I was onto something.