This page is designed as a way for the family to keep in touch. It is a place in cyberspace where our family can meet up and exchange greetings, thoughts, and our daily accomplishments and failures. I would like to think of it as a family reunion that has no end.

Our family is large and diverse. This made it hard to come up with a name for the web site. Then I realized, when we meet up, it is usually somewhere in the Rideau Settlement or parts of current day Palmetto that used to be the Rideau Settlement. So I called it the Rideau Settlement.

I hope it's a page that will remain in the family for generations to come. Also, I hope it will be a constant reminder to all of our past. Knowing the past empowers the present. It is how the present is empowered that affects the future. Therefore, no matter where we go or what we do or who we become, we will never forget where our family came from. We are who we are because they lived. They were who they were because of their faith.

We are living history. The stories of the old days are the history of tomorrow. From this day forth let us record our family's living history as it unfolds.

---Johnathan D. Rideau