By John Malcolm Dalzell

     As a youngster, I thought everyone by our surname lived in my home county in Tennessee. I didn't begin to wonder if there were others of our name somewhere out there in the world who might be looking to discover more about their ancestry until I was an adult. If my father or grandfather knew their ancestry, they never shared the information and both died when I was age 12.

     When I retired as a newspaper publisher at the close of 1988, I decided to learn more.

     My wife, son and I went to England and then to Scotland where I did research in the Scottish National Library, the Scottish Records Office and in several towns, parishes and local libraries scattered across the Upper Lowlands, mostly in the Clyde River Valley. 
I discovered the family to have been prominent in the very early days of Scotland and that they were elevated to nobility and after running down a lot of wrong trails, I finally found the link for my line between the old and new countries. It turned out that my 7th great grandfather first came to the American Colonies in July of of 1716.

I returned to the States with bleary eyes and cramped fingers from reading and taking notes. I had several spiral notebooks filled with information and then set about the laborious task of putting it into a book which I titled, The Dalzell Survivors of Ancient Scotland.

A number of people purchasing books indicted they would be interested in forming a family association so I began publishing a quarterly newsletter.  I also began receiving much mail from more distant family members wanting to know where their branch fitted in and I was able to help a lot of them.  I selected names from some of the more enthusiastic letter-writers and phoned them and asked would they be interested serving on a board of directors to help organize DFANA.
     
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