A living archive of our family's stories — gathered, one memory at a time.
Are you a Trinnaman? Add a memory, a photograph's tale, an ancestor's journey, or a family legend. Every entry helps keep our history alive for the next generation.
Margaret taught three grades in a single room, walking two miles each way through the snow. Her students remembered her not for strictness but for the stories she told at the end of each day — many of them about the very family whose name this archive carries.
Thomas wrote every week from the front. The letters, tied with string and kept in a cedar box, describe rationed chocolate shared with a French family, the sound of the sea at night, and a promise to plant an orchard when he returned. He kept that promise; the apple trees still bloom each spring.
When the first telephone line reached the valley, Ada was the one neighbors trusted to place their calls. She kept a ledger of every message relayed — births announced, crops sold, a marriage proposal accepted over crackling wire.
Joseph and his brothers raised the homestead over a single summer, felling timber from the north ridge. The house stood for over a century; its front door, worn smooth by generations of hands, now hangs in the county museum.
Eliza Trinnaman left Liverpool with little more than a trunk and a Bible. Her journals describe the long wagon crossing, the births and burials along the trail, and the first winter in the valley where the family finally put down roots.
Samuel ran the blacksmith shop that kept half the county's wagons rolling. Neighbors remembered the glow of his forge at dawn and the way he never turned away a traveler who needed a horse shod, coin or no coin.