If you were, you probably wouldn’t need me to help you build your family tree. Yes, that’s intended as humor. However, this story is told far more often than is warranted, and one should be careful not to let the desire for fame or notoriety motivate one’s research. To burst your bubble quickly, if you’re descended from one of the Rutledges on this site, you are NOT descended from John or Edward.
That being said, it’s possible that they were distant cousins, but that is not yet known, and may never be. Documentation for their family as well as ours comes to a screeching halt in the Emerald Isle. DNA provides an exciting opportunity to tease out those ties, but it’s possible that the names and family structure for the links may never be drawn out on paper.
Join the club. Our primary goal with this website in 2012 was to make our information public and to begin gathering records and accounts from relatives. To that end, we’ve been successful.
However, we also have a lot of information stored in boxes and albums that have not been reviewed. In addition, it’s a tall order to expect full details on every individual in the database, however tangential to our research interests. With that said, we would encourage you to submit the information you have, and treat this as a public repository for anyone listed on the site.