Our Family Tree
"I am a leaf on a mighty tree."

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Researching family history can be very rewarding, but also very time consuming and tedidious work. In the past most of the work to gather information was performed by hand or first hand personal experience. You filled out family group sheets, visited with relatives, travelled to the local libraries or historical societies, or even to local cemetaries and churches to gather information. One piece of new evidence would lead to another, and another, and another. Sometimes (a lot of the time) you would run into road blocks and dead ends.

Nowadays researching family history doesn't require stepping outside of your own front door with thanks to the Internet, online database records, and email. That mostly wasn't the case for Ardyth Ann Arnold (seen here in the center at the table with Helen and Lester Kampen), who researched and documented large portions of her family ancestry. She collected everything she could get her hands on regarding the family history, from newspaper articles, family group sheets, pictures, and more. Some of you may have even helped her collect and document information over the years.

I have been researching our family history on and off over the years, and have maintained this site since 2002 and I am so thankful I did. A few months back I was contacted by Myla Johnson of Watertown, SD. She is the daughter of Ardyth Ann Arnold. It was to my great surprise a few weeks back I received in the mail a rather large three ringed binder filled with copies of articles, pictures, family group sheets, and much more documenting the Kampen and Hassebroek family trees. Thank you Myla for sending that to me. I was blown away!

Myla knew it was important to continue on where Ardyth left off, and she knew it was important to share this information with all of us. The research goes all the way back to the 1800's, documenting the mainy trials and hardships faced by William and Kate Kampen, Ardyth's grandfather and grandmother on her moms side, as they started out from Illinois and travelled to Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota looking for a better life. The records that Ardyth collected are very impressive and extensive and the shear volume will take me some time to add to this site so that we all may enjoy learning more about our family history.

Any information (pictures, family records, articles, stories, etc.) added to this site, which were submitted from the family archives of Ardyth Ann Arnold will be noted as such and linked back to this page where possible. Doing this I hope will honor the dedication and hard work Ardyth undertook and to recognize her contributions for documenting our history.

Thank you Ardyth for passing the torch to all of us to continue holding forward. And thank you Myla for reaching out to me and sharing this information so that others may benefit as well.

Sincerely,
Scott Kampen

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