Where the history comes from
This family history was assembled by Evan Jones (of Lois Tucker's line — Lois → Bruce → Evan) from public records and the family's own genealogy. The main sources:
County & state records
St. Clair County parcel & GIS records for the ~59 acres and the 1997 deeds (Book N980), and the Alabama Secretary of State corporate registry for the Tucker Foundation, Inc.
Cemetery & obituary records
Find a Grave and cemetery records (the family rests at Friendship Baptist, Odenville), plus published obituaries (al.com / Legacy).
Census & family trees
U.S. Census records and FamilySearch to place the eleven children in order and reach back to the 1800s.
Ancestry & DNA
Evan's Ancestry family tree and its DNA ThruLines confirmed how living cousins connect through each of the eleven children.
It's a living document — corrections, dates, photos, and stories from relatives are always welcome (use the Contact page). Deep genealogy lives on Ancestry; this site links out to it rather than replacing it.
Why this is different
The knowledge base came first
The most important thing on this site isn't the website at all — it's the knowledge base underneath it. That's the part that took the real work, and it's what makes everything else possible.
Anyone can build a good-looking website. What's hard — and what actually matters — is the knowledge: a family tree of hundreds of relatives decoded from Barry Tucker's hand-kept records; the documents recovered and photographed at the homeplace; a genealogy verified line by line against census, cemetery, and land records back to 1804; the family's original 1850 land patent, found and displayed. We built that first. The history pages, the interactive map, the searchable tree, and the “Ask the Family Historian” helper are just the friendly surface laid on top of it.
That order matters. An application is only ever as good as the knowledge beneath it. The historian can tell you how you're related to Barry, or how the family first got the land, because there's a real, verified knowledge base behind it — not because the website is clever. Get the knowledge right, and a great experience on top of it almost builds itself. Skip the knowledge, and no amount of design can save it.
And it's built to keep growing. Every relative who registers, adds a memory, corrects a date, or uploads their own family tree makes the knowledge base deeper — and because everything else is built on top of it, the whole site gets better automatically. The data is the foundation; the family keeps pouring it.
What's solid, and what we're still checking
Honesty matters more than tidiness. Here's the current state:
- Confirmed: Samuel James & Fannie Lou Tucker and their eleven children; the 1996 Foundation and the 1997 land gifts; the line down to today.
- Still being confirmed: the children of a couple of the branches (Howard and Sara Amanda), and exactly where some living cousins fit.
- Where the family knows more than the record: some things — like exactly who did what in the Foundation's early days — live in the family's memory more than in any document. Those we leave to the family to tell, and we'd rather ask than assume.
How your information is handled
When you register, here's exactly what happens to what you enter:
What we collect
Your name and email (required), and optionally your cell, mailing address, which branch you descend from, and how many would come to a reunion.
Why
To keep a family roster, tally how many of us would want a reunion, and (if you opt in) send occasional family news. That's it.
Who can see it
This site is private to the family — hidden from Google and not linked publicly. Your phone and address are visible only to family administrators, never on any public page.
What we don't do
No selling, no sharing with outside companies, no ads, no tracking. Want your info updated or removed? Just ask on the Contact page.
How the site is built (plainly)
It's a simple, self-contained family website with a small private database that holds the roster and the reunion-interest count. No trackers, no advertising, no third parties watching. It was built for the family, and it can grow as more of the story comes in and more relatives join.
Built with Claude Code
Every page here — the history, the interactive 3-D map of the land, the searchable family tree, and the “Ask the Family Historian” helper — was researched and built by Evan Jones working alongside Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant. In plain terms: Evan described what the family needed, and the AI did the heavy lifting — digging through public records, writing the website’s code, and setting up the hosting — with Evan checking, correcting, and deciding every step.
A few concrete examples of what that made possible:
- The family tree was rebuilt from Barry Tucker’s hand-kept “family code” records (photographed at the homeplace) — the AI decoded that numbering system and turned hundreds of entries into the searchable tree you see, back to Joseph Russell Tucker (1804).
- The history was cross-checked against deeds, census records, the Alabama corporate registry, and cemetery and obituary records.
- “Ask the Family Historian” is powered by Claude, answering only from what’s in the family knowledge base.
The result belongs to the family. Nothing about a computer helping build it changes that — the names, the land, and the memories are ours, and this is a place to keep them.
Assembled for the Tucker family, 2026. Questions about anything here? Reach out on the Contact page.