I was born on 9 June 1954, in Angola, Indiana, where my father was studying Civil Engineering at Tri-State College. After he got his degree, we moved back and forth from Indiana to Missouri five times in as many years, then to New Mexico when I was eight. The rest of my family is still in NM, but I came out to California in 1972 to go to college, and stayed.
Professionally, I'm a software engineer, with an M.S. in Comp Sci from Stanford. Since September 1987 I've been working for Adobe, as one of the authors of Adobe Illustrator. Before that I worked for Xerox, and was one of the authors of the original Xerox Star, the system that first introduced the icons/windows/desktop metaphor to business computing, way back in 1981. I program on both Windows and Macintosh, but prefer the Mac whenever I have a choice of platform.
I've never been married, and I'm the mother of an imaginative and articulate 29-year-old daughter, who enjoys art, photography, playing guitar, riding horses, skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, pirates, cowboys and goddesses (for an eclectic mix :-). She graduated from Mills College in Oakland with a major in psychology and minor in studio art, and is currently studying for a PsyD at Alliant in San Francisco.
I've been doing genealogy as a hobby since I was about 20, and maintaining the Rowan County Kentucky USGenWeb site since June of 1996. My personal research is currently maintained in two Reunion databases, on a Macintosh PowerBook that I take with me just about everywhere. My other hobbies include collecting paper dolls, Mary Engelbreit dolls, and Hallmark ornaments.
My father, Medford Pettit, was born in Clearfield, Kentucky in 1927, the first child of Truby Petitt and Florence Hall. (In case you noticed the two different spellings of Pettit/Petitt, it isn't a typo. As a child, he spelled his name "Petitt", but when he enlisted in the Army, they misspelled his name, and he couldn't get his college tuition paid via the G.I. Bill if he enrolled under a different spelling. The Army said it would take 3 months to correct his record, and he didn't want to miss a semester of college, so he decided that it was easier to change his name than to change the army. Ironically, by doing so he was returning to the original spelling, as it was his grandfather Jessie who first starting using the spelling "Petitt" - or more accurately, it was Jessie's wife Emma Jane (Clark) Petitt.)
My Reunion database of paternal relatives contains over 54,200 individuals, on 39,174 linked family group sheets.
Pedigree Chart (PDF)
Family Group Sheets
Surnames I am researching on my father's direct ancestry include Banks, Barbee, Brown, Clark, Cock/Cox, Dalton, Downing, Flummer, Goad, Hall, Ingram, Jennings, Jones, Martin, Mauzy, McClain, McClelland, McCormick, Myers, Pettit, Phillips, Quesenberry/Quesinberry, Riddle, Sexton, Sharp, Slusher, Wade and Ward.
Families with collateral connections include Alfrey, Baldridge, Black, Cassity, Caudill, Conn, Cornett, Crose, Dehart, Donahue, Easterling, Fraley, Gregory, Lambert, Mays/Maze, McBrayer, Scaggs/Skaggs and Trent.
My mother, Annabelle Lee Grisso, was born in Sidney, Indiana in 1935, the youngest daughter of Charles Valentine Grisso and his third wife Ople Figert. Almost all of her ancestors were German Baptist Brethren, who came to Pennsylvania from Germany or Switzerland in the early 1700's, and migrated in family groups to western Virginia, southwest Ohio, and finally northern Indiana.
My Reunion database of maternal relatives contains over 7,000 individuals, on over 4,700 linked family group sheets.
Pedigree Chart (PDF)
Family Group Sheets
Surnames I am researching on my mother's direct ancestry are Arnold, Bollinger, Figert, Frantz, Friend, Garber, Gerst/Garst, Grisso, Hart, Heeter, Huffman, Miller, Morgan, Ohmart, Philhower, Rarick, Schuyler, Sellers, Utz, Vaniman, Weaver and Zook.
Families with collateral connections include Barnhart, Blocher, Brubaker, Flora/Flory, Ulrey and Wertz.
For those of you who came directly to this family page without going through the KyGenWeb site for Rowan County, the navigation bar below takes you to various pages of that web site.
This page is designed and maintained by Teri Pettit. Permission is granted to copy any information, images, or links from this page, so long as it is not used for commercial purposes.
The font used in the page banner is 38 pt Adobe Tekton MM Regular, with the Multiple Master axis settings at 620 weight and 488 width.
Last updated on 7 May 2014.
