Letter to the Family

To the members of the Chandler family:

Last year most of you received a copy of my first book, The Ancestry of Harry Chandler. As I explained then, I had too much material to combine the ancestry of Marian Otis Chandler with that of her husband Harry, and so I planned then to do another book in two years time. This is that second book, and it is constructed using the same format. Most of the information has been gathered from research done over the past twenty eight years, both in libraries and research facilities in Southern California, and in town halls and cemeteries in New England. It is work that will be never completed, since there is always something more to learn, and there will always be blanks on the charts, but I have been unusually successful, and it seemed time to gather all the facts together.

The first section concerns Marian Otis's childhood and adult years, as Harry's wife, and the mother of Fran, May, Connie, Ruth, Norman, Harrison, Philip and Helen.

The next section is concerned with the lives of Marian's parents, Harrison Gray Otis and Eliza Ann Wetherby Otis, and her grandparents, Stephen and Sarah Dyar Otis, and Charles and Nancy Wetherby. Please refer to the chart in the front of the book, and the larger chart in the back of the book to see how these names fit in. I was very fortunate to meet a gentleman named Steven Thal this summer who had just returned from the island of St. Paul's in the Pribiloff Islands where Harrison Gray Otis and his wife Eliza Wetherby Otis had lived during the years 1880, 1881, and 1882 (they called them the Seal Islands). Steve, who is a fellow Councillor of the Save-the-Redwoods League, had gone there as a bird watcher, since it is one of the prime bird hatcheries in the world. Since it has about the harshest weather in the world as well, very few people do go there at any time. I told him about Eliza's journal, which I had transcribed a few years ago, and he told me about his pictures, which he had not had time to have developed. We agreed to trade my journal for color prints of his slides. I had always thought I wanted to go to the Pribiloffs, if only to satisfy my curiousity about what Eliza had written about. My delight at seeing a picture of the Church which she describes in such detail, was complete. I think I probably won't make the trek to the Pribiloffs after all.

The final sections deal with what I know about the families of these four grandparents, the Otises, Dyars, Wetherbys and Hydes. They are old families in New England, and I have been very fortunate in being able to discover the identities of a great many of these direct ancestors. Like Harry's ancestors, most of them stayed close to the soil until the end of the last century, living on farms or in small towns.

I hope that you enjoy this addition to your family history library. We have a fascinating family, and one we can all be proud of.