Linnie Famon Caudill, Martin and Janie Caudill's firstborn son, was the husband of young Alice Adams Caudill, who just six months married and two months pregnant, drowned in the Basin Cove washout of 1916.

Lenny Famon Caudill, a Winston-Salem architect, is married and the father of two, a seeker of people, places, times and his ancestors. He's also the grandson of his namesake, Linnie Famon Caudill.

Lenny, like many of the early Caudill men, is lean, wiry and determined. Tracking his predecessors includes crawling through laurel thickets to find crumbled cabin sites and using GPS satellites to fix their locations. Old deeds and land-transfer records connect people to places in the Cove and elsewhere. Each step reaches farther back in time. One lady connected him to twenty more cousins. The family tree named Caudill includes Adams, Brooks, Alexander, Blevins, Tilley, Brinegar and several others.

He and his sister grew up in a Maryland neighborhood just outside Washington, D.C. His father, a Traphill native, died two years after Lenny's birth, leaving Betty Jane Harris Caudill to raise the kids on Social Security and what little she earned as an assembly-line worker. Their infrequent trips to this area introduced Lenny to family members still here. However, youthful distractions buried any serious interest in Caudill genealogy until the mid-1980's, when an aunt, Ruth Caudill Kilby Warren (in her 60's), opened his mind to the family's history.

"She pulled out a piece of paper and started scratching notes about Martin's and Harrison's children," he said. "Then she talked for about three hours, non-stop, describing log cabins, twenty-two kids, who married the sisters, the great flood, and so on. It took me about three weeks of reviewing her notes just to figure out what she was talking about. Shortly thereafter, my half-brothers, Larry and Phil, invited me on my first cabin hike. One look at the cabin and I was hooked."

He speaks of almost overwhelming emotions at being inside his great-grandfather's cabin, as if uncovering a buried treasure. From that moment, he began attaching scores of branches to the Caudill's family tree. After 20 years, he says it's nearly done. Along the way he's discovered other people doing the same thing, which lets the researchers compare notes and cross-reference data.

One mentioned is Clayton Cox, who wrote a three-volume set of books on the Caudill family. Another is Barbara Johns Groeger, whose 1960 genealogy included thousands of names and hundreds of photographs, not to mention the hundreds of people she interviewed. Though she typed it all in letters this small, the finished work was still 11 inches wide and 27 feet long! Will Cordell conducted a research group in the 90s and published 15 volumes of newsletters reaching back over 10 generations.

Rob Hahn began "Caudillcabin.org" at the turn of this century, intending to "celebrate the cabin." Lenny provided some of the material, while Rob composed and administrated the webpage. When the site's space was full, Lenny "hustled" his family out of $260 and began

CaudillReunion.org, which allows room for pictures, the newsletter and a message board. Dedicated researchers like these have connected descendants scattered all over America, often reuniting families with roots grounded in the Caudills' family tree.

A Sparta lady gave her husband a subscription to the family newsletter, pointing him to his heritage. Another wrote to request information, unaware that she was writing to her uncle. In just eight months, the publication had 120 subscribers and collected about 1,000 photographs.

The family tree soon included 12,000 names and more than 4,000 family groups! A Brooks family researcher shared information on a relative who fought in the War Between the States.

"I didn't plan on getting into the Brooks line when this started," Lenny explains. "It just happened."

Why all this work? Lenny explains it just as you might expect: "…so my kids will have it …and their kids…and their kids…. My son loves to tell people about his grandfather's cabin. One day he'll realize that it's actually his great-great-grandfather's cabin. How many eight-year-old kids can lead you through a forested mountainside to show you where their grandfather – three times removed – once lived? Money can't buy heritage and pride in your family. In that, the Caudill's are rich!"

Lenny's great-grandfather was rich in love as well. A poem he wrote to his young bride shows it very well: "When rocks and hills divide us, and we are far apart; others may have my company, but you will have my heart."

Lenny Caudill can be reached at Lcaudill@triad.rr.com, or (336) 595-2140.