"You can hardly imagine the pleasure which your letter of the 3d inst. has given me. You will better understand why, when I tell you the causes which have so nearly shut me off from any knowledge of my ancestry. My father moved into the wild woods of Ohio before he was twenty years of age, and died when he was thirty-three, and of course when all his children were small, and I, the youngest, but an infant. Separated thus from the early home of our father, we had but scanty means of obtaining anything like accurate information of his ancestry. The most I knew, until quite recently, were the family traditions retained in the memory of my mother, as she had heard them from father and his mother. During the last eighteen years I have, from time to time, picked up fragmentary facts and traditions concerning our family and its origin. Many of these traditions are vague and no doubt worthless, but I have no doubt they have some truth in them. One of them is that the family was originally from Wales. This tallies with what you say concerning the original Edward Garfield coming from the neighborhood of Chester, Eng. I stood on the walls of Chester a little more than four years ago, and looked out on the bleak mountains of Wales, whose northern boundary lay at my feet, along the banks of the Dee. Possibly I was near our ancestral home. A Welsh scholar told me, not many years ago, that he had no doubt our family was connected with the builders of an old castle in Wales, long since in ruins, but still known as Gaerfill Castle. I give you this conjecture for what it is worth. While I was in college at Williamstown, Mass., in 1854 to 1856, I went down to old Tyringham and Lee, in Berkshire County, Mass., and there found a large number of Garfields, some twenty families, old residents of that neighborhood. Among them were the names Solomon and Thomas, which seemed to have continued along in the family. I found that they had come from the neighborhood of Boston. In an old graveyard in Tyringham (now Monterey) I found the tombstone of Lieutenant Isaac Gearfield (for that, I learn, was the early spelling of the name), and on the stone was recorded 1755 as the date of his death. The family told me that he (Lieutenant Isaac) crossed the mountains into the wilderness of western Massachusetts in about 1739, and slept the first night under his cart.... I am sure I do not need to apologize to you for this long letter, for if it gives you half the pleasure yours has given me, you will not tire of its length. I beg you to write me any further details you may possess, and any you may hereafter obtain." Following are a number of extracts from letters addressed to Mr. Corydon E. Fuller:-- "WARRENSVILLE, Jan. 16, 1852.