author of Harbert Family Home Page
updated 10 January 1999
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 Ben, Paige, Janet, Dick, and Max
Harbert |
I am the fifth great grandson of Thomas Harbert (b. 1734) and Isabelle
Wright. I was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. I was named after my grandfather,
Richard Ray Harbert. I studied architecture and then math and science at the University of
Oregon where I was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. After a school break to serve
in the Air Force Reserve, I transferred to Oregon State University and graduated in Civil
Engineering in 1970. My career began with a move to San Francisco to work for Bechtel, a worldwide engineering/ construction company. Janet Humphrey and I were married in 1971. My work included engineering for nuclear power plants. I earned my Professional Engineer’s registration in the State of California . Then Bechtel took us to Washington, D.C. where our son, Ben, was born. Two years later, we then moved to Los Angeles continuing to work with Bechtel for another two years. |
I changed careers when I left Bechtel and for the next four years built houses in Portland, Oregon and also worked with my step father, Frank Honey, as a structural engineering consultant. Our daughter, Paige, was born in Portland.
In 1981, I rejoined Bechtel and moved the family to Jubail, Saudi Arabia, where I was involved in building an industrial city in the desert on the Arabian Gulf. As a family we enjoyed traveling throughout the world. Continuing a career with Bechtel, the family moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1985 where I eventually became the program manager on a large environmental restoration project to clean up low-level radioactive contamination at 46 sites in 14 states for the Department of Energy. In 1996, our family moved to Aiken, South Carolina, where I am currently the General Manager of the Environmental Restoration Division for Bechtel at DOE’s Savannah River Site.
The Harbert family's direction continues to evolve. In May 1997, Ben graduated from Wesleyan University in Connecticut with honors in Music and Anthropology. He was awarded a Watson Fellowship for self study in Cairo, Calcutta, and Madrid for four months each. Ben is now the Director of Guitar and Percussion at Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music. Paige attends Aiken Technical College and works in South Carolina.
I have been researching genealogy for the past six years. I am grateful for the information provided by all my cousins. My research has taken me to the locations of the Harbert Block House where Thomas Harbert was killed in an Indian Attack in West Virginia; the Champaign County farm country in Ohio where Josiah Harbert was born to Elizabeth (Huston) Harbert and went to subscription school; the gravesite of Hannah ( Jacobs) Harbert , "consort of Thomas Harbert," in Buck Creek Cemetery, Ohio; the area of Phoenix, Arizona, which was once the Harbert Ostrich farm; and the sites of the Harbert Deadmond Ranch and the Thurston Ranch in Oregon where John Thomas and Beulah (Stroud) Harbert raised their family.