Whose family are you here for?
Showing both families — every line on the page. Pick a side to hide the other
family's ancestors; Earl, Kristin and their three children stay on either way.
JavaScript is off, so the whole record is showing. Nothing here is hidden without
it — the control above is a filter, never a gate.
Lines · The lines
The record
H Home the fan · what changed · open questions M Migration births and deaths on a map, by decade T Timeline 609 entries · 5 erasP People 290 cards , by generationL Lines 13 surname pages The evidence
D Documents 896 thumbnails , filterableS Sources S1–S1207, with where each is cited The findings
How the wall came down Proeger line The glass patents Proeger line How the Caffey half was closed Caffey line What the DNA says its own page Four routes Migration The asymmetry Lines Open questions 20 questions Add to this record a form, read by Earl How to read this record Every claim is tagged Most family trees flatten everything into the same confident typeface. This one does not.
The three research tags below are the whole point of the exercise: they say what a document
proves, what the weight of evidence suggests, and what nobody has found yet. A fourth marks
what the family stated directly, where no document has been retrieved at all — it is kept
separate on purpose and is never quietly promoted to confirmed . A fifth, added on
13 September 2026, marks biological evidence: a DNA result is not a document, and it is not
testimony either. Two further labels mark where this page withholds information
rather than lacking it.
Confirmed Attested by a document that was actually retrieved and read — a census sheet, a
government index, a grave marker, a family-written obituary.
Probable Strongly supported but not nailed down: a user-contributed tree, a masked index field,
or a chain of consistent circumstances. Believable, not proven.
Not found Searched for and not located. This is a statement about the search, not about the
person — the record may well exist somewhere unsearched.
Family testimony Supplied by the family and recorded on their word — no document has been retrieved for
it. Note the diamond rather than the dot: this is provenance, not proof, and it stands
apart from the three record tags above S24 .
DNA evidence Biological evidence consistent with a claim. It corroborates origins ; it does
not by itself establish a person or a link. Note the bar rather than a dot or a diamond:
no DNA result on this page is ever counted as confirmed , because no document
was read for it S46 .
Living — withheld The person is living. By the privacy rule for this page, name and relationship are
shown, and at most a year the family has already published. Full dates of birth, ages,
places of residence and record identifiers are held back.
Research in progress A branch that is actively being worked on. The node exists in the structure so the
shape of the family is honest; the detail is simply not in yet.
Lines · The lines
Skip to sources ↧ See the lines another way: where each was born and died, on a map · lifetimes side by side · every direct ancestor on one fan .
The two five-generation charts on the front page stop at five generations because that is as far as a side-by-side
chart stays readable. Several lines run further. They are set out on these pages as separate
chains — oldest ancestor at the top of each column, descending to Earl or to Kristin —
one column per surname, because the lines do not all reach the same depth and pretending
they do would be the single most misleading thing this page could do.
Read the tags before you read the names. Depth and certainty run in opposite
directions here. Everything below the second-great-grandparents is almost entirely
Family testimony — parent links in a relative's
Ancestry tree S57 , an 1878 subscription directory
S59 , and a published family genealogy
S58 . Not one of those is a record, none of them has
been promoted, and one whole branch is quarantined outright .
The asymmetry, stated plainly Earl's side reaches 1631, probably, through Eva Kreber's baptism at Langenburg, and about 1673 for certain on the Prüger line in Württemberg. Kristin's side
reaches 1690. Earl's other lines stop at 1779 and about 1825. The two sides now reach
back about the same distance, and neither gets there because it was researched harder
than the other. They get there on different kinds of evidence.
Kristin's depth comes entirely from testimony — a relative's tree and a
published Caffey genealogy carry the line back through Ireland to a couple in Dorchester
County, Maryland, and no record retrieved for this page joins them to her. Earl's 1673
comes from church registers : the Württemberg parish books, read in September 2026,
take the Prüger line back to Hans Pröger, who came from Seibotenberg to farm at Triensbach in
1704. His other lines
stop earlier, and mostly stop on documents : a death certificate that reads
"No record" for the parents, a census that names the Azores and no island, a
Virginia birth register that named two more ancestors and then ran out. The one
exception proves the rule — the Coffman line runs back to Martin "Hawkbill" Coffman,
d. 1805, on a 1940 compiled genealogy rather than a record — and the book's
citation has now been checked against the county's actual records and does not match.
Samuel Coffman as David C.'s father is Confirmed by Library of Virginia registers;
the generation above Samuel is Unsupported as stated and chipped accordingly.
Neither side has been padded to match the other. A line ends where its last
documented person ends.
Kristin's lines
Earl's lines
Silva The Azores → Alameda County, California · a documented generation with no names 4 generations · 6 people with a card Rose Portugal → Washington Township, Alameda County · the second unnamed generation 3 generations · 10 people with a card Coffman, Wright & Brooks Shenandoah and Page County, Virginia → Callahan County, Texas · reaches generation 7 9 generations · 13 people with a card Bowles, Williams & Brock Kentucky → Taylor County, Texas · reaches generation 8 5 generations · 33 people with a card Timberman, Martin & Chenault Philadelphia and Sumner County, Tennessee → New Jersey · reaches generation 9 7 generations · 45 people with a card Proeger & Kochendoerfer Gerabronn, Württemberg → Pittsburgh → Los Angeles · the wall is now the ship · reaches generation 13 12 generations · 77 people with a card Earl's deepest named ancestors are his 3rd-great-grandparents , three couples
attached by FindAGrave parent links, the earliest born in 1825 . His deepest
documented generation is the same one — but on two lines the people in it
have no names , and those slots are drawn below exactly like any other.
The count, and why it is not printed This page used to print four hand-typed totals here — named ancestors, filled slots,
and a split between the two sides. They are gone, and deliberately. Every one of those figures was
typed by hand, and every one of them was wrong within three days: ten more named people
arrived on Earl's side alone between 15 and 17 September 2026. A hand count is a claim
like any other, and this one could not be kept true. The chains below are the count
— each person appears exactly once, with a generation number and a chip, and they can be
counted by anyone who doubts the total.
The shape is what matters and the shape has not changed: Kristin's side carries roughly
half again as many named ancestors as Earl's , second wives, step-parents and anyone
who is not a direct ancestor are excluded, and so are the rejected Walker generations
above. Rather more than half of the named people now rest on
records that were retrieved and read ; the remainder are
Probable or
Family testimony — and the balance shifts
sharply toward testimony below the second-great-grandparents. That is the honest shape
of the research, and the tags on this page are what make it visible.
Living direct ancestors appear by name and relationship here — Earl's father Bill
Proeger and Kristin's mother Clare "LaVonne" Walker. This section is a chain of names and
generations, so it carries no dates for anyone, living or dead; the full record for each
of them is on their own card. Living adults are published in full on those cards,
under Earl's instruction of 21 September 2026 . Minors appear by name only ,
with no dates, places or other detail, and they appear nowhere in this section at all.
Everyone in the record, by generation, is at the people index .