Welcome to the Internet Home of
The Wilson Association
Best Viewed on a Computer
Fast Track to the Index of Wilson Family Members by Name
What is the Wilson Association?
What This Site is Not
Site Under Construction
Using This Incarnation of the Site
Contacting the Managers of This Site
What is the Wilson Association?
The Wilson Association is composed of all descendants of Alexander and Jane (Armour) Wilson, who came to New York City from Scotland, about 1763. The Association was founded in 1903, approximately the 140th year of this Wilson family in America, and held the first Wilson Family Reunion the same year. It adopted a Constitution and ByLaws at the 4th annual reunion in 1907.
As stated in the Preamble to its Constitution and ByLaws, the purpose of the Wilson Association is to "cement[] ourselves and our descendants into a closer relationship and to perpetuate the love and remembrance of the dear ones who have gone before."
The Wilson Association, and the annual Wilson Family Reunions, were the inspiration of Mary Viola "Mate" (Wilson) Farnsworth. Mate was the daughter of Stephen Melvin and Eleanor Pease (Seeley) Wilson, the granddaughter of Alexander Jr and Eunice Charlotte (Seeley) Wilson, and the great-granddaughter of Alexander and Jane (Armour) Wilson. To the best of present knowledge, Mate also drafted the Wilson Association's Constitution and Bylaws.
All descendants of Alexander and Jane (Armour) Wilson are members of the Wilson Association by right of birth. In order to confirm your membership in the Association, you need only provide information showing your line of descent. For more information, please go to Membership Information. Spouses of descendants are members of the Wilson Association under the Constitution and Bylaws. Although the Constitution and Bylaws have not been amended to include other family members, we consider all partners, adopted children, and in-laws to also be Wilson Association members.
The Wilson Family Reunion is held each year on the second Sunday in July. The 111th Annual Wilson Family Reunion will be held at Krull Park, on Lake Road (Route 18) in the Village of Olcott, Town of Newfane, Niagara County, New York, on 13 July 2014. Please see the Reunion page for more information. If you are a descendant or spouse of a descendant of Alexander and Jane, or think you might be, you are cordially invited to attend the reunion. We will have information that will help determine your relationship.
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This Site is Not:
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a general source of information on the surname Wilson. This is the story of one particular family, not of a name. And as a family, we are just as proud of our women as of our men, and we lovingly embrace our multitude of surnames, while maintaining our sense of family stretching back to our original Wilson ancestors in America, and, from them, to our ancestors in Scotland;
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a general source of information on the families that married into this Wilson family. Although information on collateral families will be given to the extent it is known and time permits, and interesting and/or well-known individuals who are members of those collateral families will be highlighted as they are discovered, we make no claim that information on collateral families is in any way complete;
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written in stone. The information presented here is the best we had at the time it was posted. That does not mean everything is correct. A genealogy is always a work in progress. If you find errors or omissions, please let us know so that we can correct them;
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a place from which to download family trees or create a report on a specific branch of this Wilson family. Neither our genealogy nor its software resides on this site. Family trees and other reports can be obtained, but must be requested;
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a storage place for all of our source material. This Wilson family has been maintaining genealogy information for many generations, so much of the original information on family relationships came from family members themselves. That information is now being augmented through research into official records and other source material. However, neither the source material itself nor notations to the sources reside on this site. Again, information on sources can be obtained, but must be requested;
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a place to find information about living Wilson and collateral family members. If you are interested in contacting a person who you believe is a member of this Wilson family, you may inform us of your interest. If we have contact information for the person, we will pass your request along, and that person can decide whether or not to contact you.
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optimized for viewing on mobile devices. This site is very text intensive. The amount of information presented makes for very long and wide pages. For the most part, the site has displayed well on tablets and i-Phones, and we have made some changes that should allow those pages that had issues to display better. However, we have not tested every brand of mobile device. Until we have finished actual mobile versions, this site may not format correctly on all mobile devices. Depending upon your browser, it might have some formatting issues even on a computer.
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Site under Construction
Please forgive us for any problems you may encounter while using this site. We are trying to address two main issues: (1) designing a website that is friendly both to people who grew up with the internet and to those who didn't, and (2) presenting a very large amount of information in a way that is meaningful and, hopefully, intuitive.
This third iteration of our own website retains the same general format as the first two. To date, no one has had negative comments on the structure of the site itself, so we have decided to keep it, at least for the time being, so that we can concentrate on content. In this version of our website, in addition to starting to incorporate information from the 1940 census, that was released in 2012, we have devoted time to developing a few more indices to help in navigating the site.
As we have said before, this is a very small fraction of the information that will ultimately be on this site. In the future, some information may be available to the general public, while other information may be for Wilson Association Members only. At this time, only information that would be available to the general public in the future is presented here. As an example, many members of the 6th and later Generations, which have recently been added, are either still living or may still be living. These living and possibly living individuals are only vaguely identified on this site. Another example is that, although there are many people we would like to thank for sharing their own genealogies, stories, pictures, etc, we will acknowledge them only by their first names.
Please let us know about any mistakes or problems you encounter. Some we will know about, but you may be the only one who notices a particular issue. Also, we would appreciate your thoughts on the presentation of information; what you would like to see that isn't here yet; anything you don't like about the site; anything you do like; and any other thoughts.
If you are a family member or a friend of the family, and have pictures, stories, or other information you're willing to share, we would love to hear from you. This site will be updated based on new information received.
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Using This Incarnation of the Site
This incarnation of our website contains information up to the 9th Generation of Wilsons. As far as we are presently aware, no 10th Generation descendants have yet been born. As mentioned above, very limited information is included on living family members.
Because of uncertainities about the linkage of collateral family members, information on those families has initially been removed from this version of the website. It will be added back as we have time to verify the links, as well as the information.
We are still working on some information, and we ask you to bear with us as we do so. If you come across a section of the website that appears to be incomplete, it may well be that we have completed the work on part of that section, but have also posted part on which work is still being done. The thought was to give people an idea of what was coming, even though it is incomplete. We are working on these sections and will update the information as quickly as possible. One example of this is the description of cemeteries. We intend to provide information about the location of each cemetery, as well as a map and a satellite picture of the cemetery. This work, however, is far from complete at the moment. Another example is the transcription of a journal kept by Mary Catherine (Smoyer) Wilson, wife of Benjamin Ernest Wilson. This journal can be reached from Mary's main page. The first part of this journal has been annotated with both regular "footnotes" and with links to people Mary and Ben saw on their trip. For many of those people, their information has not yet been posted to this site, so you will get an error message from some of the links. The annotations for most of the journal are not completed, and the photographs Ben took on the trip have not all been added.
If you find the wait for any of this information too long, please consider volunteering to help with this site!!!
We are continuing to work on improving the navigation. As we add more information, navigation becomes more of an issue. We are attempting to provide the easiest and most intuitive navigation possible. However, you may still find yourself on a page from which there is no easy or obvious escape route. In these instances, please continue to make liberal use of your browser's back button.
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Contacting the Managers of This Site
You can contact the Managers of this site by email. Please use the following address, in proper email format: Info at wilsonassociation dot net
Hopefully, the use of this process will cut down on the amount of inappropriate and unwanted emails received.
However, we still reserve the right to not respond to any communication that we deem inappropriate - by our standards, not yours. Not responding means that we will not inform you that we are not responding. If you do not hear back from us, consider what you wrote and how you wrote it. If we receive more than one inappropriate communication from a source, we will block further communications from that source.