L. D. Ratliff family
Lemuel and Myra and ten of the eleven children
The person at the top left is a cousin that was staying with the family when this photo was taken.
Greetings!
Welcome to this archive of the Lemuel and Myra Ratliff family history and heritage. Its purpose is to document the past in order to share it with the future generations of this family. They gave us so much, not only in our heritage, but also in how they lived and what they taught us through the examples they and their descendants set. It would be a shame not to document all that we can and pass it down to the future generations of their family.This website has been started and funded by two of the great grandchildren, Claire and Brian Blackwell. We are the children of Doris Blackwell, who was the middle daughter of Theodore Ratliff, the second child of Lemuel and Myra. Theodore, or Ted as he was known, was the historian of the family, having been a history teacher all of his life. His two daughters, our mother and her older sister, Dorothy Ricketts, began their genealogical research into our Ratliff and Pace family history over fifty years ago. This data could not have been compiled without their inspired dedication to give us our roots.
It is also our desire to honor their work, not let that effort fade away, and to capture what the family knows, while some of us are still around to document it. Doris Blackwell used to lament how if only her father had asked his grandfather (Marquis Lafayette) Ratliff who his grandfather was, she and Dorothy would not have been stumped at tracing the Ratliff family further back than M. L. Ratliff’s father, John Ratliff, who died during the Civil War. At the onset, the family tree information contained in this archive is that researched by Dorothy and Doris, with contributions from Edith Gunn and Billy Campbell. They devoted themselves to locating official sources of information like census, probate, and family records, found in books and microfilm – all pre-internet!
If you are a member of this family, please consider registering for access to this archive by clicking on the 'Login' link on this Home Page, and then going to 'Register for a New User Account' at the bottom of the window that opens.
Website established May 2019. Research began decades ago!
“To know nothing of our ancestry or from whence we came, to have no reverence for the precious moments of the past is to ignore the elements and influences which have made us what we are.”
Marshall P. Wilder
How the family had grown by 1942!
Not all of the grandchildren are in this one, but most of them are. We do have the names of everyone in this one.