On Joining the DAR, Application In Progress

I’m very excited about my recent application to join the DAR, National Society, Daughters of the American Revolution. In my previous post I mentioned that my qualifying ancestor for joining the FFOB was John Merrill (Merrell), a Revolutionary War soldier. He will also be my qualifying patriot for joining DAR, I hope.

After my application to join the First Families of Old Buncombe was approved, I researched how to join the DAR and contacted the chapter near me to get information. They put me in touch with the chapter’s registrar whose role is to guide new applicants through the process.

The DAR Application Process

The process begins with gathering the birth, marriage, and death documents for the first 3 generations, including the applicant. From there, the registrar can help applicants do research in the DAR database to find out if your family matches up with someone who has already joined.

For example, if you have a distant cousin or other relative who joined, you only need to document your line to the point where it connects to their line.

In my case, I already had most of the lineage documented back to my patriot, John Merrill. We found that no other applicants descended from John’s daughter Elizabeth, but some of my other lines did join those records. Even so, I wanted to join through Elizabeth so she would be in the DAR database, and not forgotten. This was important to me since I'm fairly certain I know where she is buried, but I haven’t found a record to prove it, so far, and the grave is only marked by a field stone.

Gathering the Records

Most of the work I needed to do for the application was gathering records for the most recent generations. We family historians seem to do better with the distant ancestors than with recent family members, forgetting that someday they’ll also be someone’s ancestors.

Luckily I live only a couple of hours away from my family's hometown, so I was able to get all the documents I needed from the court house. Easy-peasy!

The local registrar prepared my application according to the DAR specifications and together we reviewed it once more. Once she was satisfied that we had as much information about the generations as we could find, the application was ready to submit to National Headquarters for official review. I was told it could take a couple of months for the application to be processed, so now I'm waiting.

The registrar I worked with was wonderfully helpful, and she seems to be very busy helping several applicants at a time. I'm very impressed!

Now that I'm in waiting mode, my next order of business is to write the lineage genealogy. Stay tuned for that, coming soon I hope.