Ridge Haven Family Heritage Site

Re-membering our family one story at a time.

“We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience, and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography” (*Emerson p.240).

If we climb to the top of the mountain ridge, we will see all the separate things we’ve encountered along the way as one great landscape. One Great Story. In this way, our family story is our story. When we re-member our family, we re-member ourselves into this great landscape. Through the careful collection and curation of our family history, artifacts, stories, memorials, and genealogies, Ridge Haven represents the ever-onward ascent toward beholding the Truth of who we are.

From this perspective, Ridge Haven is not just a place. It is a state of mind. And yet, it is a place also—the place where we nurture our family soul. Our primary work at Ridge Haven has been to house, preserve, organize, protect, and make available our family history, family stories, published works, genealogies, and family artifacts. When received, each collection is professionally archived and digitized. The goal is to prevent, as much as possible, the diffusion of our history, and to make these collections accessible to future generations. The full vision of Ridge Haven’s collections includes a family history museum where the library and family collections and artifacts can be displayed, accessed, and stored in a safe and secure way. We’ll also offer a way to access the family resources online through a Members Portal.

More important than history and documents and stories and artifacts is the well-being of our family’s seniors. Therefore, a further goal for Ridge Haven is also to serve as a place of physical respite for our senior members—if and when they need it. We have had family members live out the last days of their lives in unspeakable and undignified conditions, and we are determined to provide a better option. We refer to this as the Pearl Gardens. Many may not need Ridge Haven’s Pearl Gardens, but some will, and we want to be prepared when that time comes.

And for those members who have already passed out of this dimension, Ridge Haven is also home to our family’s memorial gardens. While the gardens provide healthy food for our bodies, they also provide food for our souls, as they are used to re-member those who have have passed through the installation of memorial plaques. Our ancestors and our recently departed are still with us in real and meaningful ways, and the memorial gardens serve as a reminder of their continued influence in our lives.

When Ridge Haven was established on the 20th of November 2020, we intended it to be a place of learning. We have great plans, and to see them fulfilled requires much dedication to learning and growing–and Ridge Haven has been that. We don’t know what the future holds, but we know that Ridge Haven is at the heart of Re-Membering our mission on this earth. We invite you to continue on our journey with us, and our greatest hope is that this website will give you an opportunity to encourage, and to be encouraged.

^{* Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Joel Porte. Essays & Lectures. 2 vols. The Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the U.S. : Distributed to the trade in the U.S. and Canada by Viking Press, 1983.}

Take a tour of Ridge Haven’s Gardens and the Family History Library. Click the arrows on the side of the image gallery to advance to the next image.

Ridge Haven Virtual Tour