# Introduction This book traces the story of eight interconnected families across three generations to my great-grandparents —from their European origins to their lives in frontier America, and eventually into towns and cities of the Inland Northwest. For each of these eight families, I wrote a story about their journey. These narratives preserve the cultural and personal legacies of the Petrie, Cooper, Helbig, Bartosh, Daubel, Strong, Rudolph, Spence, and other families that contributed to this lineage. Have you ever wondered where our ancestors came from? If we go back four generations to my 2X great grandparents, only four out of sixteen people were born in the US. The rest were immigrants. Looking at the nationalities of the fourth generation, I found eight Germans, five English, two Czechs, and one Swede. The four US lines of Cooper, Lanphere, Strong, and Newman have a long history in the US, dating back to the 1600s and the great migration. Each chapter is dedicated to a family surname, providing context, biography, and family trees that show how these lines converged and evolved. ![[Genealogy Publish/Media/Darren_Tree_5g.pdf]] We will look at each of the third generation families in the following order: * [Petrie](Genealogy/Family_Stories/Petrie_Families/Petrie.md) * [Cooper](Genealogy/Family_Stories/Petrie_Families/Cooper.md) * [Helbig](Genealogy/Family_Stories/Petrie_Families/Helbig.md) * [Bartosh](Genealogy/Family_Stories/Petrie_Families/Bartosh.md) * Daubel * Strong * Rudolph * Spence