Sometime in the early 1970s my younger brother Doug began researching our family’s roots. I’m not sure how far he got before he died, suddenly, in 1976. But I know he did manage to trace our father’s lineage to Wales, a place where the surname Webster is far more common that anywhere our family lived in the U.S.

And as a military family, we lived in a lot of places – up and own both coasts, for three years in Texas and four years in Hawaii.

This was long before tracking down family histories became the rage that led to the founding of such companies as the embattled 23andMe and Ancestry.com. It seems that many of us are hungry to discover who our ancestors were and where we came from.

As for me, Ancestry.com says I’m 29 percent Welsh, 27 percent Germanic European, 25 percent Scottish and a smattering of other identities – including, surprisingly, 1 percent Ashkenazi Jewish. Shalom, Grandma Amelia.

Such a search for family history was the main reason why my wife and her sister, Jean, were so intent on going on a road trip from York, PA, to West Virginia, specifically to West Virginia’s capital city of Morgantown. Both are related on their mother’s side to Morgantown’s co-founder, Zackquill Morgan. Their maternal grandmother’s surname, in fact, was Morgan.

So the two sisters, with Jean’s husband Steve and I in tow, made the 200-plus-mile drive from York to Morgantown, a city that I had never had the opportunity – or, to be honest, desire – to visit. (In my past visits to all 50 states, I had once driven through the middle of West Virginia. But I missed Morgantown, which is located in the upper northeast corner of the state.)

And I have to say I’ve never seen an American city set so much into the side of a cliff. Just driving around, trying to get a feel for the campus of West Virginia University, was a frustrating exercise in GPS positioning. Streets seemed to go left and right, up and down, at random. Morgantown made San Francisco feel as flat as, well, Davenport.

But back to the Morgan family … according to an exhibit in the Morgantown History Museum, Zackquill Morgan was born on Sept. 8, 1735, somewhere in Berkeley County, WV. He and his brother David served in the Virginia military under Gen. Edward Braddock and Zackquill, at least, survived Braddock’s ill-fated 1755 mission to capture Fort Duquesne.

After selling land that had been bequeathed to him and his brother by their father (uniquely enough named Morgan Morgan), Zackquill Morgan moved sometime in the 1760s to what would become Monongalia County. During the Revolutionary War, and now a colonel in militia, he served as the county’s Lieutenant and later led his troops during the Battle of Saratoga.

As for the founding of Morgantown, originally Morgan’s Town, it came about when Morgan received a land patent of 400 acres in 1784. A year later, Morgan – with the approval of the Virginia General Assembly – sectioned off some 50 acres of his holdings into half-acre plots that he then sold. These plots became the city center.

Morgan himself became a tavern keeper, the city’s first. He died on Jan. 1, 1795.

Fitting our visit, we stayed at one of Morgantown’s historic hotels, suitably named the Hotel Morgan. Built in 1925, the hotel was purchased by the Wyndham Hotels & Resorts company and renovated in 2020. Over the years, the Morgan played host to such guests as Eleanor Roosevelt (in 1934) and President Harry Truman (in 1954) before becoming mostly a place catering to those who’d come to visit the nearby university – and celebrate following Mountaineer football games.

In our search for the story of Zackquill Morgan, and after visiting the city’s museum, we went looking for his grave. That took us to historic Prickett’s Fort State Park, which sits some 17 and a half miles southwest of Morgantown.

The original fort was built in 1774, and it served as a place of refuge for those settlers who were trying to forge a living on lands occupied by Native American tribes that included bands of the Shawnee, Mingo, Wyandot and Lenape/Delaware. The settlers, when threatened, would flee to the fort for safety – and so was born the phrase “forting up.”

Though the original fort no longer exists, a group called Prickett’s Fort Memorial Foundation built a replica on the same grounds, which the state park’s museum describes as “a small rise overlooking the confluence of Prickett’s Creek and the Monongahela River.”

Just a short drive down the road leading to the fort we found a small graveyard. And amid all the headstones, many dating back 150 years and more, we found the grave of Zackquill Morgan (though the original headstone, a bare rock with the words “Colo ZM Jan. 1, 1795” scrawled on it, is on display in the Morgantown museum).

The new headstone gives a fairly comprehensive history of the man. Sitting next to the grave of Morgan’s wife Drusilla Springer, it was erected 1927 by the couple’s “descendants and relatives.”

It carries a meaningful message, too. “The living present owes a debt to the past.” Our trek to Morgantown was, at least in part, a way of honoring that debt.

I think my late baby brother would have understood.