OK, so we're going to restore the James O'Neal Family Cemetery. It sounds like a fun project . How do I help and/or donate?

If you want to volunteer for a work party, contact cousin Ken. He will be setting up the dates and times. You can contact Ken by email at kon@hhs.net or contact me at johnoneal@onealwebsite.com. I will be posting the work parties on the James O'Neal Cemetery Restoration page on the O'Neal Web Site and in The O'Neal Genealogy Association Newsletter.

Send monetary donations to Ken also. When you send donations to Ken, send me an email. Ken will confirm when he receives the donation and I will send you a receipt. 
The same goes for material donations. Receipts will be sent on O'Neal Genealogy Association stationary and can be used for tax purposes. (Please email Ken for his mailing address. I don't want to list it on the web.)

Every person who donates to this effort will have his/her name  immortalized on the James O'Neal Cemetery Restoration Contributors page on the O'Neal Web Site and in The O'Neal Genealogy Association Newsletter. 

Recently we found a new cousin, Mrs. Betti Moore from Maryland. Actually she found us through the O'Neal Web Site. She is a descendant of John O'Neale, Son of William O'Neal, son of Jeseph O'Neale. She has just forwarded a lot of family information, too much for one issue of the newsletter, so we'll be reporting more as the months go by. 
 

In her girlhood days, and even in her widowhood, Mrs. Greenhow was often called "the Wild Rose of Wolleston Manor." The one referred to her exquisite beauty, the other to the ancient hall of her ancestors where she was born. To those who knew her intimately the sobriquet needed no explanation, for she never was a tame creature and yet she never was wild in the modern sense of that term. There was a luxuriant growth in her nature, that, with its blossoms, was characteristic of the Cherokee rose to which she was compared. 

Her complexion had a wild-rose tint, and her hair was of the color that once set a war in motion. 
The people of the South have often given the name of a favorite flower to a young woman who possessed "great beauty, excellence of virtue,"  And among Catholics, the faith to which she belonged, the name wild rose was "frequently used to designate the Virgin Mary." Mrs. Grecnhow's baptismal name, Rose Maria, was not carelessly chosen by her parents. 
If one had the privilege of choosing the spot where he wished to be born, he could find none more attractive than Wolleston Manor. Long ago the old manor house was destroyed by fire, and not a vestige of it remains to tell its story, 
The site where once it reared its lofty walls still exists -a small plain fronting the majestic Potomac for a mile or more, and presenting a vista of such rare natural
beauty and splendor as to have no compeer on either side of that noble stream. Standing on the spot where the manor was erected in the early days of the
Seventeenth Century, to the left, as one looks out on the river, lies a grove of primeval oaks, beneath whose shade the heroine of this narrative played when a child.
No doubt she heard from her parents and from her kindred the saga of her family, one of the proudest that ever came from England to settle this continent.