Byrnesville, Barnesboro, Northern Cambria, Cambria County, Pennsylvania

We've had plaques of the Byrnes Family Crest and Coat of Arms in the family for years, our dad (Edward Joseph Byrnes) and his brothers (our uncles) always had one; sometimes featured in the living room and sometimes in the family rooms.

Bending to the demands of the latest in interior design, you might at times also find the Byrnes Family Crest and Coat of Arms hanging in the basement sharing space on a pegboard with a number of hand tools.

Made of hand-painted repoussed metal, copper-tack tacked to the dark wooden plaque, our Byrnes Family Crest and Coat of Arms has been in our immediate families since the early 1960's.

Buttons made for the Byrnes Family and Friends Reunion of 2005 also featured the Byrnes Family Crest and Coat of Arms. (See Byrnes Family and Friends Reunion 2005 click here.)

The boy closes the wooden screen door gently, the sound of the spring and the smell of the air bring the fact home, he really is in Pennsylvania again. Just outside the back door he stands on the cement walk and looks across the yards and up the hill. The lawn holds a suspended layer of water droplets of transluscent white, heavy dew. He raises his eyes and looks at the gold-brown field up behind the hotel and below the big house where the Shuma's live. The field is soaking wet and not yet in the sun. The air is thick with morning, the hotel an iron red of asphalt shingle siding and white painted frames of wood trim the windows.

by Jane Tripp

How he learned of his great grandfather John Platt is a mystery -- perhaps some family stories of Revolutionary War soldiers, as both his grandfathers were soldiers in the War of the Revolution.

Valentine's sister's son, Charles Vignos, was approaching 30 when the reply came from the Bureau of Pensions. Later, in the 1930's and 40's, Charles would visit Cambria County in reference to his American Mine Door Company. Charles' Platt family research was done in person in the libraries, courthouses and church offices, mainly in Pennsylvania.

He walked many a cemetery and interviewed many a relative and any old timer he met who would talk to him of days past. When gas rationing in the 1940's slowed down his trips to Cambria he corresponded by letter to many, including Clair Bearer who knew many members of his Platt family. Charles' secretary typed his notes.

Years later, after his death, copies in the form of five binders were donated by his grandson Joe Wagner to the Cambria County Historical Society in Ebensburg. Joe Wagner certainly expanded on his grandfather's research and is the author of many Platt and related family papers. I do not know if the binders at Ebensburg are the original Vignos binders or contain some of his grandson Wagner's expanded research.