Garden

Gay Spiker lovingly tended her garden at the Spiker Farm, taking great pride in the way she could transform the property into a living outdoor "room". Many of the trees, plants and shrubs she nurtured are still thriving on the farm today. Years after Gay's death, her daughter-in-law, Willa Dean Bonnell Spiker began planting seeds for a different kind of garden -- a garden that would become the bed for the Spiker Family Tree.

Searching public record archives, visiting cemeteries, going through family papers, and identifying hundreds of photos, Dean laid the foundation for the garden. Lists were written by hand and the memories compiled onto paper. Some of these documents were later handed over to daughter, Bobbi Spiker Conley and granddaughter, Haley Conley who began converting the data into searchable computer files. Soon thereafter, another of Dean's daughters, Melanie Spiker Fouse, became the official Spiker Family Gardener, taking "cuttings" from what the others planted to cultivate new "shoots" of family history. From the roots up, Melanie now maintains the most complete and accurate recording available of the Spiker Family Genealogy.

Grab your walking stick and take a leisurely stroll through the Spiker Family Garden. Here you can enjoy some of the "fruits" of Melanie's intensive search into the "vines" that link the present to our past.

The Landscape

	Climb the Spiker Family Tree
	View the Spiker Family Tree online.
	Grow Healthy Trees
	Create your Medical family tree.
	Heirloom Gardening
	Past, Present & Future
	Planting the Seeds
	Get the family involved in preserving the past.
	Genealogy Gardening Tools
	Links to the best Genealogy sites on the internet.

The meandering paths through our garden may lead you to areas just outside our gates. Here you will discover some interesting facts about the communities in which the Spiker family lived.

Submitted by Mike Spiker:	The I-68 westbound Welcome Center near Hazelton in Preston County features a life-size display of a Dimetrodon, a meat-eating pelycosaur (similar to a dinosaur, but more closely related to mammals) that roamed the hills of West Virginia more than 280 million years ago. Fossilized footprints of the creature have been discovered in Ritchie County, West Virginia.

	For more info, check out these Internet sites: American Museum of Natural History Prehistoric Planet features the Coal-Age Monsters

The History of Ritchie County, written by Minnie Kendall Lowther.	Published just 67 years after the formation of the county, this book has come to be regarded as one of the most important single works on Ritchie County Genealogy. It was published serially in the Ritchie Standard between 1906 and 1907 then expanded into book form in 1911. It has been transcribed here for easy viewing.