About the Webmistress

Okay, just so you know, I don't even pretend to be a REAL genealogist. I do genealogy strictly in the tiny bit of spare time that I have to devote to it now. I have five children and three websites to maintain, so you can imagine that there are not very many spare moments when I feel inspired to work on my genealogy. And when there is, I usually can't get out of the house. :-)

I do love the IDEA of real genealogy, and it is a goal I aspire to. I am slowly learning that documentation is very important. My goal is to someday have source notes on every person in my genealogy program, and preferably to include original sources in as many of the source notes as possible. When I first started my main goal was just to get the names in the program. And documentation was never my strong suit even when my genealogy was only on paper.

Lots of the research I've done recently (meaning in the last 10 or so years) has been via the Internet, including this site, which was originally created by Eugene Kraybill. It was his brainchild and it is truly amazing that he thought of all this. Lots of people were very excited about this site. Therefore lots of us were very sad when the site disappeared.

We thought the worst--so I stepped up and volunteered to put the website back up if anyone had printouts of it. One person had the entire site saved onto his hard drive! We finally did locate Gene, who had just been extremely busy moving, etc., and we talked, and he basically decided to let me keep this website. I'm honored to continue the wonderful project he started.

I grew up in Strasburg, Virginia, in an area where many Crabills have lived over the years. My grandfather loved genealogy as well, but never had the resources available to take the line further than Hannes Crebil who came on a boat from Germany. Therefore we always thought we were from Germany. It is so exciting to know that we are from Switzerland originally.

I am married, and as I said before, I have 5 children. I'm active in my church and in a Civil War reenacting group. Besides this website I also have a Mead Family website, where you can learn more about my family if you like, and my Beadie Critters website, which features hundreds of free patterns for a very popular craft.