Welcome to the online Vining Genealogy. (For an overview of the whole Vining web site, please click here.) The purpose of this online genealogy is to provide accurate, documented information about the Vining family. Photographs/scans of source material will be posted for the viewer to evaluate. New material and documentation will be added as it becomes available. Most of the information below, gleaned from a variety of sources, is undocumented and needs to be substantiated. After source material (scans of the actual material, not just references to the sources) is posted below, individual researchers will not have to "reinvent the wheel" by tracking down the same material that others have already found.

NEW INFORMATION AS OF 1 FEBRUARY 2008 - This online Vining genealogy has a new form of organization that will affect a procedure that you may have followed in the past. Until now, you have been able to see all the families included to date in this genealogy by scrolling down a very long page. However, contributions from many Vining family researchers increased the number of families so much that the computer software used to create this online genealogy could no longer handle the entire file with all its hyperlinks. Therefore, the material has been divided into multiple files, and this means you can no longer "see" everyone by scrolling up and down. However, once you enter one of the new files (see next paragraph for instructions), you can still follow a lineage through time (forward or backward), just as you always could. When you follow a lineage you will often be jumping from one file to another, but you will not notice that you are doing this due to the ability to link from a family in one file to a specific family in another file. (Those of you with a slow connection (e.g., dial-up) to the Internet may experience a brief delay when a new file is opening.)

To "enter" the online Vining genealogy, click on the letter (or range of letters) below that is (includes) the first letter of the first name of the Vining father (or single-parent mother) whose family you are interested in. Then scroll down the file you are taken to until you reach the name you are looking for. For example, if you want to look up the family of Benjamin Vining Jr., click on the letter B below, wait until the B file has opened, and then scroll down to Benjamin Vining Jr.

A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P    Q    R    S    T    U    V    W    X-Z (no families in this group)    unknown first names

Within each file, family units are arranged alphabetically by the first name of the Vining father (or single-parent mother). Links are provided to enable you to move up and down each lineage. To follow a line back in time (ancestors), click on the underlined portion of "(son of ...)" or "(dau. of ...)" beneath the name of the person you want to trace back. To follow a line forward in time (descendants), click on the name of the person whose offspring you want to see. A plus sign (+) following a name means that that person had one or more children, but that family group has not been added to this web page. For census information, click on "census data for this family" at the end of a family's entry. To view documentation (other than census records) for a particular individual, click on "documentation" to the right of a parent's name or to the right of a child's data. If a child eventually had offspring, the link to the documentation for that child will be found to the right of his/her name when a parent. For a partially developed example of what I envision, see the family of Thomas Vining and Releaf S. Walker below.

Please note: I appreciate very much the corrections and additions that many people are contributing to this genealogy. However, the real value in this project is the documentation that, unfortunately, is rarely contributed. Please, if you have images of gravestones, census records, or, for deceased persons, birth, marriage, and death certificates, submit them, and I will post them for the benefit of all. Thanks.

All information, especially source material, for inclusion in this web page should be sent to info@vfthomas.com or mailed to "Vining Genealogy; V. F. Thomas Co.; P. O. Box 400; Southwest Harbor, ME 04679". And, of course, please report all errors.

A little work by each of us will save a lot of work for all of us.