Welcome to The Road to Ethel, a home for all Louisiana Brians, Pences, Tarvers, Bennetts, Paxtons and affiliated families who are interested in learning more about their roots.
I developed an interest in genealogy in 2010 when I was on disability leave and looking for something to do to keep myself from going stir-crazy. I didn’t have much of a strategy other than finding relatives and seeing how far back I could trace the family name. Slowly my interest grew into a passion.
Then one Christmas we noticed that something seemed off with Mom. She had been forgetful for years but this was more than that. Later we realized she had been showing signs of advancing dementia. Mom had always loved history and family stories so it seemed to me that genealogy would be right up her alley. My plan shifted and I began looking at her side of the family, hoping to share it with her while she was still able to understand. Sadly, Mom’s illness progressed faster than my research and we were never able to have those conversations.
The shift in focus from Dad’s side to Mom’s led me down a new path that was not surname-centric. I began to encounter many, many last names in my tree and the notion of “my family comes from England” began to seem inadequate, if not meaningless.
The name of this website refers to the tiny town of Ethel in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, where my mom, Laura Brian, was born and raised on a small dairy farm. She went to school in nearby Clinton, married my father at the Ethel Baptist Church, and then moved to Baton Rouge to start a family. For years, every Saturday morning my mom and aunt would load my siblings and cousins in the car and set off for “the country” where we explored, climbed trees, caught and ate catfish, dodged cow patties, and occasionally got our pants legs caught on barbed wire. Some of my happiest childhood memories took place during those Saturdays.
The Road to Ethel is not my story, or even my mother’s story. It is the cobbling together of hundreds of stories from within a family tree composed of Brians, Bennetts, Tarvers, Paxtons, Pences, Morgans, Hardins, Stathams, and a myriad of other family names. Its branches stretch all the way from Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland and Germany, to a small dairy farm in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana that will always feel like home.