This is the Genealogy site of Rod Garren.  I'm a native of Colorado and can re-trace my Garren family lineage from present day to my ancestors who migrated to Colorado in 1870 from North Carolina.  From North Carolina my direct ancestry can be traced back through family migrations from Colonial Pennsylvania and the New Jersey, Maryland areas in the late 1600's.

The Garren family and the Garren family tree is massive and I've been fortunate to have had the opportunity and privilege of working with a number of family researchers while compiling this family lineage.  To those that have been so much help I can only pass on a sincere thank you and hope that future researchers will have an opportunity to review their work as well.

As to my Danks family linage, early on I became aware of the work of a distant cousin who had done volumes of work on the Danks line and in all reality I can only take credit for the addition of my Grandfather Arthur and his descendants.  In tracing the Danks line we begin in the early 1700’s in Virginia and follow the line though an ever westward migration though Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas and finally Colorado.  In addition both family lines have several branches that have spread over virtually the entire nation.

My involvement and research of both the Garren and Danks family lineage was actually the result of having received a crate of items from my Grandmother, Margaret Firm Garren.  "Maggie" gave me a number of family items that had been stored in the attic of her home in La Veta, Colorado for years and among those items was a family Bible belonging to William Garren, my Great, Great, Great Grandfather.  Years and years of storage had taken a serious toll on this Bible and initially I considered just throwing it away as it was terribly damaged by mold and mildew after having spent roughly a hundred years wrapped in brown paper, string and a coating of tar.  This was an obvious attempt by an ancestor to preserve the Bible, but as it turned out the wrappings and coating hastened its destruction.

In 1992 I was watching a show on television that detailed some of the restoration work that's done in Europe regarding ancient manuscripts.  I researched the matter and eventually shipped the Bible off to Italy to be accessed for restoration.  The end result of that assessment was that the Bible was found to be too damaged to be fully restored, but through the use of some advanced techniques we were able to glean some information from it's dedication page and that it is in fact of early American heritage, printed and bond in the New England area, between 1780 and 1800. To view an ultra violet photo of the Dedication Page (isn't technology wonderful!) and a transcription of its contents please click on the William Garren Bible link on the navigation bar.

As a result of these findings, I've spent the last several years assembling both my Garren family tree in addition to my maternal Danks Family Tree.  The result has been a wonderful experience and a remarkable tour of family members who lived through the founding of this nation, fought in its wars and helped settle its wilderness.

The information found on this site may be freely used for private, non commercial purposes, but please understand that as I will eventually combine well over two thousand distant relatives in the combined Garren / Danks Lineage, the possibility for minor errors exists.  This site is not designed as a definitive source, but rather as a starting point for other researchers to carry on from.  Those with a genuine interest in genealogy will quickly find that we live in a marvelous age of computers, email and fax machines.  What would have taken months or even years and a great deal of travel to research only a few years ago, now can be accessed in seconds.  As researchers we're all responsible to take the lead, dig even deeper than the researcher before us and solve the mysteries.  When you do that and you actually nail down one of the family mysteries, there's a tremendous feeling of accomplishment involved and also a duty to make the information available to others.

This site will continue to grow as time passes and I seriously hope that the information contained here is a help to my distant cousins...seeking their roots.

Sincerely,

Rod Garren