Allen R. Cooke of Charlotte, NC began a genealogy project featuring the Cary Family of Gloucester County, Virginia in 1995. He visited Gloucester and interviewed folks related to the family and discovered family documents that shed light on the history of the family prior to the Civil War. Since the Gloucester County court records were destroyed in Richmond in 1865, much of the county's history has been lost. The records pertaining to the Cary Family opened up opportunities to trace the family back into the 17th and 18th centuries.

Allen R. Cooke has traveled extensively to conduct his research at repositories in many states from Massachusetts to California including local courthouses, libraries, state archives, the National Archives and the Library of Congress. He has contacted many living descendants of the Cary Family, his 2nd through 6th cousins, seeking to learn about each branch of the family and to share what is known about the ancestry. It has been a most rewarding endeavor, and many bonds of friendship have formed. The goal of the project is to publish a book that will contain all that is known with documentation about the descendants of John Cary and Mary Reade, including pictures he has collected and anecdotal stories. The scope of the project covers descendants to the end of the 20th century.

Allen R. Cooke was born in 1949 and attended the University of Virginia and worked many years in the printing ink industry. His interest in genealogy began when his maternal grandfather gave him a family tree representing that side of the family in the 1960s. His grandfather Wagner was from Austria, so it was a valuable family document that traced the roots of the Wagner family back into the 1700s in Europe. The family tree had a side for his father to fill out, but was left blank for many years. In the late 1980s, the husband of his father's cousin living in Newport News, Virginia found a copy of William Carter Stubbs' book on the Cooke Family entitled Descendants of Mordecai Cooke and Thomas Booth. With this book, he was able to begin filling in the Family Tree on the Cooke side. His father, William Cracraft Cooke was always proud of the Cooke Family heritage tracing back to Gloucester County, Virginia.

Tracing back, he endeavored to add the ancestry of spouses and found that Thomas Buckner Cooke, his great, great grandfather was married to Catherine Cary before the Civil War. The Stubbs book provided no details and court records had been burned. A visit to Gloucester County began a journey into the history of the Cary Family. Some old family manuscripts and a Bible record were found and showed that the Cary Family was a prominent family intermarried with a number of old families of Gloucester County. With the information available from these sources, he set out to try to develop it further and to contact descendants of other branches of the family who might have artifacts that could shed further light upon the origins of the Cary Family in America.

The project grew by leaps and bounds and is presently the definitive study of this Cary Family and contains the names and genealogical data of every descendant known to Mr. Cooke who has made an exhaustive search. There are about 24,000 names in the database.

Pictures and Videos

William Cracraft Cooke, Jr. on left, Allen Randolph Cooke (author) on right holding the Nora Wagner Cooke Memorial Trophy in honor of our mother at a horse show in the vicinity of Charlotte, NC in 2005

Here is a link to a video of the author clog dancing!