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Linda Roorda

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Blog Entries posted by Linda Roorda

  1. Linda Roorda
    (Originally published as front-page article in the local newspaper, Broader View Weekly, March 21, 2013. )
    My family’s memories: 
    Sharing about the old ways of collecting sap and making syrup brought to mind the stories my mother has shared over the years.  The Tillapaugh family of 12 children in Carlisle, New York made and sold maple syrup for several generations, and my cousins continue the annual tradition today.  My mother, Reba, and her younger sister, Lois, readily recall the childhood fun, albeit hard work, of helping their dad and older siblings during the 1930s and 1940s.  Lois shared with me, “As the youngest I did look forward to maple syrup time.  A lot of hard work, but worth it, with memories forever.” 
    Their dad and older brothers used a hand-turned brace to drill holes in about 300-plus trees.  They’d pound in the spiles from which buckets were hung, with lids placed by the younger girls.  When the sap ran, besides regular dairy farm chores and caring for a few thousand chickens, they had daily sap gathering.  This involved dumping each bucket’s worth into a holding tank on a large bobsled pulled by a team of black Shires (Dick and Daisy) or Belgians (Bunny, Nell, and Tub) on a trail through the woods.  My mother said that if rain got into the buckets it turned the sap brown, and they threw that out.  And, they often trekked the woods to gather sap with two or more feet of snow on the ground.
    Carlisle’s woods are not like those in our south-central finger lakes region.  Carlisle has rolling hills with limestone boulder outcroppings, many crevices and mini-caves.  With Howe’s Cavern near Cobleskill, the town of Carlisle and the Tillapaugh farm also have small caves with nooks and crannies throughout the woods.  There was a defined trail for the horses through the woods, but everyone had to walk carefully among the trees.  I remember as a child seeing a good-sized cave opening in the ground in the woodlot next to one of the farm pastures, so I can attest to their having had an interesting trek among the rocky outcroppings to collect sap.
    With a love for horses since my childhood when my father farmed with Belgians (and Clydesdales before marrying my mom), I can visualize the Tillapaugh’s harnessing their black Shires with flowing white “feathers” on the lower legs, listening to them clop along, stepping high in unison.  I can imagine the creaking harness and traces, maybe bells tinkling, the big sled’s runners scraping along a gravel road or gliding atop the snow. 
    At this point, my mother chuckled to recall a day she rode out on the sled carrying the sap tank with an older brother, Maynard.  When he jumped off as they went up a hill, the sap tank tilted and she fell off, the sled nearly running over her but Maynard stopped the horses just in time.  Another time, she got a tiny piece of metal in her eye from a bucket lid.  The doctor had a large magnet to draw the speck out, but she refused to let him, petrified it would pull her eye out!  She has no idea how the metal ever did get out of her eye, but there was no damage.
    When the holding tank was full, it was taken to the sap hut, and sap drained into one of two 4x8-10 foot evaporator pans over a wood fire.  I questioned her about the size of those pans, but she was adamant about the very large size.  Considering her memory has not failed her for other details, I saw online there were, indeed, evaporator pans this large.  The oldest brothers stayed at the sap hut boiling all night, often around the clock, watching the temperatures carefully with thermometers.  Lois also recalls their mother made lunches which the girls took out to their brothers.  
    My mother agreed with my aunt who said that “when the partially cooked syrup was ready, it was brought to the house in milk cans.  Mom would finish boiling it to the correct temperature over a kerosene stove in the summer kitchen, and strain it through felt into gallon glass jugs, mostly for home use, some to sell.”  My mom added, “Some syrup was boiled down more to make maple candy, or poured over the snow for a delicious sweet chewy treat.”
    Maple syrup helped their family deal with sugar shortages and rationing during the Great Depression and World War II.  At the end of the season came the hard work of cleaning all the equipment, repeated when the season started.
    After the youngest Tillapaugh brothers, Winfred and Floyd, retired and sold the family dairy herd in 1974, they built a modern and efficient sap hut closer to home.  Using both pails and plastic tubing, Floyd’s son, Duane, recalls other cousins helping them tap a few hundred trees in a venture which eventually grew to around 1000 trees.  “Back then, we put a pill in the drilled hole [to kill] bacteria.  I believe that’s illegal now.  We burned wood, but Dad rigged up a thing that would blow old motor oil in when it was close to syrup [stage] to make the fire hotter to push it to syrup.”  They sold syrup from home in pint, quart, half-gallon and gallon containers, also making maple cream and candy.  Their peak years produced about 200-250 gallons of syrup annually.  That was, indeed, a sizeable maple syrup operation!
    I researched online articles about the use of paraformaldehyde pills/tablets in the tap hole years ago.  Controversy has surrounded its benefits of cutting bacteria and helping the tapped tree heal versus the pills leading to fungi setting in with increased decay versus the fact that formaldehyde was making its way into food for human consumption.  Therefore, its use became illegal in the 1980s.
    Knowing that Native Americans made maple syrup centuries ago, I delved into their sugaring process.  They would make a slash in a sugar maple tree, collecting the sap as it dripped out.  Hollowed out logs were filled with fresh sap, and white-hot field stones were added to bring the sap to boil.  The Indians repeated this process until syrup stage was reached, or until they had crystallized sugar.  When the first Europeans arrived, the Indians traded maple sugar for other products, and taught their sugaring secrets to the new settlers.  
    Referred by my cousin, Bruce Tillapaugh, a retired Cooperative Extension agent, I contacted Stephen Childs, the New York Maple Specialist at Cornell University.  Childs said, “Cornell has a number of resources for backyarders and beginning maple producers.  Much of the information is available online at Cornell Maple.  We have a Beginner DVD and Cornell Maple Videos.  We hold many Beginner Workshops in the fall and winter.  A maple camp is held in June that is three full days of instruction for new commercial producers or small producers planning to expand.  There are recorded webinar programs online that interested persons can watch.”
    I also found a brochure online for the beginner written by a local resident:  “Maple Syrup Production for the Beginner” by Anni L. Davenport, School of Forest Resources, The Pennsylvania State University; Lewis Staats, Dept. of Natural Resources, Cornell University, Cornell Cooperative Extension, 1998.
    Maple syrup not only tastes good, but with a little more research, I learned it’s good for you!  It is a natural source of manganese and zinc, important for our immune defense systems.  Zinc is an antioxidant which protects our heart by decreasing atherosclerosis and helping prevent damage to the inner lining of blood vessels.  It is also known that a zinc deficiency can lead to a higher risk of prostate cancer.  Zinc supplementation is used by healthcare practitioners to help reduce prostate enlargement.  Studies have also found that adults with a deficiency in manganese have decreased levels of HDL, the good cholesterol.  Manganese helps lessen inflammation, key to healing.  Just one ounce of maple syrup holds 22% of the daily requirement of this key trace mineral. 
    Syrup also contains iron, calcium and potassium which help repair damaged muscle and cells.  It can settle digestive problems.  It can help keep bones strong and blood sugar levels normal, help keep white blood cell counts up to protect against colds and viruses, and maple syrup is not a common allergen.
    With all the goodness going for itself, 100% pure maple syrup is truly worth all that hard work!  Enjoy!
  2. Linda Roorda
    As we conclude our discussion on how and where to begin your ancestry research with suggestions based on my experience, I thought it would be helpful to collect the online resources in one place.  The following is a list of some of the many online sources which I found most helpful. 
    I also continue to stress that not all submitted family records on any given site are totally accurate.  Unintentional errors and misspellings in data do creep in.  It is up to you to seek out and prove the accuracy of whatever data you find online about your ancestors.  Unless you know a book is truly accurate and can prove the author had sound documentation, do not take a published book as fact “just because it says so.”  That’s how I proved errors that had been accepted as fact for decades as I noted previously.  The extra footwork involved can be extensive, but it’s worth every effort put forth to have solid documentation for your family’s ancestral heritage.
    Click on each website you wish to visit entitled in bold black and underlined:
    Ancestry.com – free 1880 census record; but, for an annual subscription fee, you get in-depth census records from 1790-1930, military records, city and national records, land records, international records, family trees, baptisms, marriages, death index records, and so much more.
    Family Search - free website with 1880 census records, baptism, marriage records, death records, and submitted family data.  Books and documents on microfilm can be ordered and viewed at a Family History Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, locally in Owego or Elmira.  They also have a free down-loadable Personal Ancestral File, PAF, which I have used, though I prefer the Family Tree Maker.
    My Heritage – discover your roots in a free trial to a subscription-based genealogy compilation.  I have not used this site.
    Olive Tree Genealogy - free old church/cemetery records, 1600s ships’ lists, records for New Netherland, Palatines, Mennonites, Loyalists, Native American, Military, and Canadian data, etc.  I found this website to be very helpful in my early research nearly 20 years ago.
    RootsWeb – free source of records, county genweb sites, surname lists, e-mail lists, posted documentation for cemeteries, church records, family websites and more. Recently underwent a full-site rebuilding, so I am not as familiar with its changes, but it's well worth checking out for valuable resources under various sections.
    CyndisList - free listing of American and International records and resources – a great resource.
    Vital Records – U.S. birth certificates, death records, and marriage licenses for a fee.
    U.S. GenWeb – free County GenWeb sites with a lot of data to aid your research.
    Three Rivers – free source for middle-eastern New York families in the Hudson, Mohawk, Schoharie river regions, family genealogies, books, etc. 
    Sampubco - Wills from several states, but not all wills.  Fee for copies.  I purchased several wills from this website and was very pleased with the service.
    National Archives and Records Administration –  Click on Veterans’ Service Records section to begin searching.  You will find military service records, pension records of veterans’ claims, draft registration records, and bounty land warrant application files and records available. Order forms are free, but you pay a fee to order copies of records. Well worth the cost.
    NARA contact/forms – see various forms listed for National Archives Records Administration, government war records.  Obtain free forms from which to order military records including pre-Civil War full service records or pension application files (on NATF Form 85 and/or 86; forms are free).  Some list family members, others do not.  You will find a good amount of information in files re: a soldier’s service, enlistment, capture, discharge, death, etc.,; these records provide valuable documentation.
    Soldiers and Sailors Database - Civil War Soldiers and Sailors Database for military records.
    Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island Foundation - search passenger and ship manifest records free, or order quality record copies for a fee.  Ship manifest records are also found at Ancestry.com, a subscription resource.
    New York Biographical and Genealogical Society – very trustworthy site with many online articles/records; they are working to put more records online; however, most are limited to membership in the Society.  The Steele Library in Elmira has the full set of the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record and the New England Genealogical Journal.  I can attest to the high quality of published research and records in both journals.  I used these journals in my research, with my documented research articles published in the NYGBR.  Search my name and you will find my published articles.   In order to publish, you must prove all of your statements with solid documentation.
    Making of America, Cornell University – old books, magazines, newspapers online in searchable/readable format – worth wading through this free resource.
    Higginson Book Company, Salem, Mass. - old maps, family surname genealogies, county/state historical books, published cemetery and church records, etc. Contact for free catalog; copies books/records obtained for a fee but worth it, from which I purchased a few books.
    Olin Uris Library, Cornell University - Cornell University’s guide to research in their extensive holdings.  They note that, unfortunately, not all their genealogical books are kept in one section. 
    Find-A-Grave - free resource of many gravestones around the United States.  Be careful of family notes – I found errors in a family of my close relatives; when I contacted the contributor who added notes tying my family to theirs by error, there was no response, no correction.
    Tri-Counties Genealogy & History by Joyce M. Tice - A local website for genealogy research and local history in Bradford Co., PA, Chemung Co., NY, and Tioga Co., PA.
    TIPS ON FRAUDULENT LINEAGES:
    Family Search Fraudulent Genealogies
    Genealogy Today: Good Researcher Gone Bad
    Gustav Anjou, Fraudulent Genealogist
    Genealogy.com, locating published genealogies
    Genealogy Bank:  Researching your Pilgrim Ancestry from the Mayflower
    Again, locally, the Steele Library in Elmira has an excellent genealogy section on the second floor to aid your research.  I spent many a Saturday morning searching through their collection for documentation on my ancestry data and can highly recommend it.  Cornell University also has a major genealogy library collection, but I was afraid to go on campus for a personal visit. 
    I purchased several books for my personal library of my family ancestry with records of the Early Palatine Families of New York 1710 by Henry Z. Jones, Jr., history of settlement and families of Montgomery and Fulton Counties, NY and Schoharie County, NY, CDs of the New York Genealogical & Biographical Record articles, early Schenectady families by Pearson, and so much more if anyone is interested in a lookup.
    And, last but not least, your local library can order books through the interlibrary loan system.  This was a tremendously helpful resource to me for out-of-county and out-of-state historical/genealogical books, including those in Cornell University's repository.  I could not have done it without these resources. 
    I must also give credit to the many friends I made along my genealogical journey, some of whom proved to be distant cousins and have remained close friends, and from whom I learned.  We shared data, books, and a love for our ancestral families.
    And now, I wish you every success as you search for your ancestors.  Enjoy your journey!
  3. Linda Roorda

    Your Family Tree #3

    By Linda Roorda,

    Okay, let’s start researching!  As you ponder a few names in your ancestral tree, the burning question may be, “How do I start looking for ancestors I don’t even know about?”  Actually, the best way is to begin working backward from what you do know.  Start with your birth certificate to prove your parents.  Obtain copies of birth, baptism and marriage records, newspaper death notices or obituaries, and cemetery records of your near relatives. 
    Research can be an expensive endeavor and I will admit I’ve not done all I’d like to simply for that reason.  I’m able to join the DAR with about ten ancestors who served in the Revolutionary War; and, though I have a good deal of documentation, I’ve not been able to afford all that which is necessary for the DAR forms.  I know that I have DAR status with the evidence in my hand, and don’t need to prove that fact to an association.  Yet, even on a limited budget, you can accomplish a great deal like I did with the resources available - particularly as my initial online research of records for several years was done using the painfully slow dial-up internet service!  Along with meeting extended distant relatives with whom you may be able to share data like I did, and with whom I remain in contact.
    Make a list of your known and extended relatives.  Talk to the older folks and write down their memories and stories, especially before they are no longer here to share their memories.  They are a wealth of information, and will be honored to have you ask.  But, again, research helps validate the truth from “stories” which might have snippets of reality amongst exaggerated stories passed down as family history.  Check out Cyndi’s List for a great listing of various types of charts and forms which can be printed off to help you keep records.
    I also wish I had had an interest in knowing my family history when I was younger and my grandparents were still alive.  With my mom born as child 11 of 12 in a large farming family, her parents were long gone by the time I finally developed an interest.  And, since both her parents were only children, there’s a paucity of extended “rellies” for me to speak with. Yet, I’ve met other extended cousins and have enjoyed getting to know them while we compare our family lineage notes.  
    With her own family history interest, my mom recalled bits and pieces, but that’s why the original family tree mentioned in my first article was vital.  Working through the known three generations to prove their accuracy, my empty-nest project evolved into a 600-plus page manuscript.  I documented historical family backgrounds and descendants from church and cemetery records, historical records, census records, and books, etc. for every known surname branch.  Don’t research just the male lineage as some folks prefer; the women are equally as important to your heritage!  I even included research on the extended families as a record of their historical times and how families became intertwined.
    If you are fortunate enough to have access to them, search old diaries and letters which may reference family members.  Old family Bibles often list family births, marriages and deaths, but not all do.  For example, an old Bible found in the brick McNeill house in Carlisle, NY by the current owners (with whom I became friends) held no data other than three McNeill obituaries, two of whom were known to be related.  Yet, the obits became key evidence in my search as one obit was for a Martha McNeill Tillapaugh Seber of Decatur, New York.  That little piece of paper gave credence to my theory that she is related!  She is the presumed daughter of Samuel McNeill as she fits the age of a female born 1814 on his census records, the only McNeill family in Decatur at that time.  This gave a descendant, who I was assisting, substantial probability for Martha’s birth family since his family papers noted Martha McNeill was born about 1814 in Decatur, thus lending credence to our being distant cousins.
    The following also shares how one clue leads to another in research.  Based on a gut feeling, I purchased Robert McNeill’s War of 1812 pension application file after finding him on the 1820 Carlisle, New York census.  He lived very near my ancestor, John C. McNeill (typical of the old generations), and was listed on the War of 1812 muster rolls. 
    In pension application affidavits, Robert noted service at Watertown and Sackett’s Harbor, New York and as a guard of prisoners on a march to Albany.  He made no mention of service on any ship.  Sadly, I had to break the news to a descendant, cousin and now friend, that Robert’s claim to be in a famous battle on Lake Erie during the War of 1812 was not backed up by documentation in any of his records.
    Also, unfortunately, he served only 53 days of the required 60, making him ineligible for a pension.  However, additional key data found in his affidavits note Robert served in place of his brother, Samuel McNeill, of Decatur, Otsego County, New York, and that he, Robert, lived first at Carlisle, Schoharie County, New York.  Thus, he was born about 1794, after his parents removed from New Hampshire to New York.  Bingo!!  I now had two more presumed brothers of my known Jesse McNeill!  When Robert enlisted in September 1813, it appears he was about 18, unmarried, willing and able to serve for his brother, Samuel, who had a young family per the 1810 Decatur census and who presumably had farm crops to harvest.
    By census records, we track Robert and family on the 1820 census in Carlisle, Schoharie County, New York, the 1830 census in Conesus, Livingston County, New York near his wife’s relatives, and the 1840 census in Dundee, Monroe County, Michigan.  After his first wife died, he lived near his sister’s family in Wayne County, New York where he remarried, moving his family back to Michigan per 1860 census.  I like to think of them as “frequent flyers” on the bustling Erie Canal, sailing Lake Erie from western New York to the frontier in southeast Monroe County, Michigan.  Curiously, his second wife is later found without Robert on census and cemetery records with their children in Wayne County, New York.  As Robert is listed on census records in the homes of his first wife’s children, dies and is buried in Michigan, his descendant (Marjorie, my distant cousin and friend) and I have concluded that he and his second wife separated, but never divorced, as she died and is buried in Wayne County, New York.
    There is so much to be gleaned by searching for and finding actual records.  
    Coming next:  Document everything, every step of the way!
  4. Linda Roorda

    The Nail

    By Linda Roorda,

    Easter… I remember one year when I was a little girl getting a special new dress, white bonnet, and pretty black patent leather shoes to wear to church, and, of course, chocolate candy.  I also remember fun when my Mom helped us dye hard-boiled eggs. But what youngster doesn’t get excited about also getting a basket dressed up in pretty pastels, filled with sweet treats, stuffed bunnies, and other toys. And don’t forget the ever-popular Easter egg hunt with more candy or toys tucked inside plastic-colored eggs… the makings of childhood fun!  And this year, enjoyed making a chalk-art drawing on our sidewalk for others to enjoy on this beautiful day.

    But, all my life, I’ve struggled with the dichotomy of our holiday celebrations… holding close the deeper faith-based, heart-felt meanings versus the popular fun and whimsical traditions.  Sometimes it seems we take our Christian celebrations for granted.  We do appreciate them for their remembrance of all Jesus did for us, but we have not always contemplated the intimate details in a more personal way.  Focusing on Scripture and Jesus’ words, His sacrifice, and self-contemplation a few years back, my thoughts prompted this poem and contemplative reflection.
    Have you ever seen or held an old-fashioned iron nail? I'm sure many of you have, just as I have. Researching the history of nails, it’s a rather fascinating subject, and I learned that not until the latter 19th century did we begin producing round cut nails by machine.   Bronze nails have been dated back to about 3000 b.c., with the Romans the first to eventually use harder iron for their nails. Since the earliest nail was first made, each hand-forged nail has been  out individually by a blacksmith from iron heated in the fire.  The nails were typically square, flat on four sides, tapering to a point at the other end.  An online search brings up images of such nails from a hundred plus years ago all the way back to include Roman crucifixion nails.  Those old Roman nails were ominous-looking objects about 5-7 inches long and half an inch wide at the top… and doubt I’d be wrong to call them spikes.
    So, it makes me shudder to think of the damage one of those Roman nails could do to a person’s flesh and bone.  It also seems like a heart hardened to the cruelty inflicted was required for the job.  And that was after the condemned criminal had been flogged mercilessly with the flesh torn and stripped from his back until he was hardly recognizable.  I did not go to see Mel Gibson‘s movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”  I know I could not have watched it for those very painful reasons.  There’s a movie playing in my mind from reading the passages in our Holy Bible, and I prefer that personal familiarity.
    The above-referenced images are those which typically come to mind as we contemplate Jesus’s crucifixion during the Passover.  Condemned under trumped-up false blasphemy charges by Jerusalem’s synagogue leaders, yet found guiltless by Rome’s representative, the crowd defiantly yelled, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”  As the leaders promoted the release of Barabbas, a rightfully jailed and sentenced criminal, the crowd demanded that Jesus take his place on the cross instead.
    Thinking “Oh, the shame of it all!”, we also wonder how the Jews could condemn an innocent man to such a horrid death, one of their own who healed their sick and who spoke wisdom into their lives.  But they did not understand His life’s purpose.  As they condemned Jesus, little did they know they were actually fulfilling prophecy about God’s only begotten Son whose very life was a sacrifice for even them. So here I stand, holding tight that nail and pounding it in deeper with every sin I’ve ever committed… and will commit… unless I confess, repent, and accept His gift of salvation.
    And it humbles us even more to know Jesus went to that cross willingly.  The Son of God willingly died for me… for you!  He took our place… and bore our shame… to redeem us from all of our petty and monumental sins, in the past and in the future.  For “we all, like sheep, have all gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”  (Isaiah 53:6 NIV)  
    Yes, we have each gone astray, perhaps in only minor and seemingly insignificant ways, but our perfect God still calls sin what it is - “sin”.  To know that God deeply loved you and me before we even came to be, and that He sent His only Son out from a perfect heavenly home to this fallen world for our salvation is simply overwhelming.  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  (John 3:16)  I am forever grateful for such a gift of love… and that He came to shower you and me with His limitless forgiveness, mercy and grace.
     And as we celebrate the death and triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, let us never forget the sacrifice He made for each of us.  Have a Blessed Easter!
     
    The Nail
    Linda A. Roorda
    Gripping the iron between my fingers
    I feel its cold and lifeless form,
    And it’s at this point my wandering thoughts
    Flash back in time to another day.
     
    Would I have taken that nail in my hand
    When before me lay a man condemned,
    Bruised and beaten, battered and bloody
    A man despised, forsaken and worn?
     
    But, in fact, I did.  I did take that nail.
    With hammer in hand I raised my arm,
    To pound that nail into flesh and bone
    And heard its ring bring pain and anguish.
     
    Deep in my heart, I knew it was wrong.
    He’d done no crime, no offense or harm.
    But with every strike my sins came to mind
    For I’m the one who nailed him to the cross.
     
    And yet with each pound his face was serene
    No anger or hate… but a tender deep love.
    With tears I confessed, “My sin nailed You there!”
    While He replied, “It’s for you I died.”
     
    “It’s for you I came.  For you I suffered.
    For your very soul I gave my all…”
    Death will not gain the heart of faith,
    The heart that to Him forever is pledged.
    ~~
    2017
    A version of this poem and personal reflection was initially posted on The Network, an online resource of the Christian Reformed Church.  
     
  5. Linda Roorda
    A Scottish castle on the Hudson?  Drawn to the hazy beauty of this photo, I was mesmerized by the castle’s classic lines… so reminiscent of centuries-old castles scattered around the British and Scottish moors and highlands, intrigued to know it sat upon American soil.  After researching and naming my Mom’s maternal Scots-Irish, I am proud to say that they, too, hold a special place in my heart amongst all my Dutch ancestors.

    Photo of Bannerman's Castle  by Will Van Dorp, on his blog, Tugster.
    Think back with me to an earlier day when the adventurous Europeans followed Henry Hudson’s momentous sail north on a river now bearing his name.  It was an era of exploration, a prosperous time for the Dutch and their friends as they established a considerable presence in the settling of Nieuw Nederlands… and traveled freely up and down the North River with its invitingly peaceful, and beautiful, sylvan surroundings.
    Now envision a fairy-tale castle of Scottish design built upon a solid rock foundation, entirely surrounded by a pristine and placid river as its moat.  At times though, depending on the season and storm, the waters become riled and treacherous, perhaps evoking images of an ancient castle set upon the lonely and stormy seacoast of bonnie Scotland.  Such a sighting embodies the ambiance of castle life in the Middle Ages…  a time of chivalry when knights in shining armor went out to battle, bravely protecting their sovereign and his empire, returning home with honor to win the heart of a certain fair young maiden…
    Roughly 50 miles north of New York City lies an island comprising about 5-1/2 or 6-1/2 acres (depending on source) along the eastern shore of the Hudson River as you head north.  Pollepel Island is a lush growth of trees, bushes, flowers and gardens, clamoring vines, weeds, bugs, ticks, snakes, and rocky ground.  Not surprisingly, the hardy Dutch left their influence on our language and place names all throughout the new world in both New Amsterdam proper and environs of the greater New Netherlands.  Naturally this little island, Pollepel (i.e. Dutch for ladle), was named by these hardy early settlers, situated in an area designated as the “Northern Gate” of the Hudson River’s Highlands.  Just like in the Old Country, the island’s natural harbor provides the perfect setting for a castle… Bannerman’s Island Arsenal, to be exact.  Arsenal, you ask?  Yes, a place where knights could well have donned shining armor for their king and perched behind the battlements with all manner of arms.
    Long before there was a castle of dreamy old-world architecture, it was said that Native Americans refused to take up residence on this mound of rock.  Believing the island to be haunted, the Indians rarely dared set foot upon it in daylight, if at all, while their enemies flaunted that fact by seeking refuge on the rocky shore…
    The hardy mariners who once sailed Hudson’s North River left a legacy of legends and tales of this little island.  Washington Irving of Tarrytown told with skillful imagination the story of “The Storm Ship”,  also known as the “Flying Dutchman”.  Fear of goblins who dwelt on Pollepel Island was as real as that of their leader, the Heer of Dunderburgh.  It was well known that Dunderburgh controlled the winds, those furies which provoked the waters, making safe passage of the Highlands a thing to be envied.  With the sinking of the famed “Flying Dutchman” during an especially severe storm, the captain and crew found themselves forever doomed.  And, if you should ever find yourself traveling the river near Pollepel in such a storm, listen closely… for in the howling of the winds which whip the sails, you just might hear the captain and his sailors calling for help.
    Another legend which early Dutch sailors spoke about was that of Polly Pell, a beautiful young lady rescued from the river’s treacherous ice.  Romantically saved from drowning by the quick wit and arms of her beau, she married her rescuer.  Such are the dreams of the romantically inclined…
    From a more practical perspective, Gen. George Washington used the strategically placed Pollepel Island during the American Revolution in an effort to prevent British ships from sailing north.  “Chevaux de frise” were made of large logs with protruding iron spikes which, when sunk upright in the river, were intended to damage ships’ hulls and stop the British from passing through.  However, these particular obstructions, set up between the island and Plum Point on the opposite shore, did not deter the resourceful British.  They simply sailed with ease past the sunken deterrents in flat-bottomed boats.  Washington also planned to establish a military garrison for prisoners-of-war on Pollepel Island, but there is no proof extant that his idea was ever implemented.
    According to Jane Bannerman (granddaughter-in-law of the castle’s builder) in “Pollepel - An Island Steeped in History”, the island had just five owners since the American Revolution era:  “William Van Wyck of Fishkill, Mary G. Taft of Cornwall, Francis Bannerman VI of Brooklyn, and The Jackson Hole Preserve (Rockefeller Foundation) which donated the island to the people of the State of New York (Hudson Highlands State Park, Taconic Region, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation).”
    Francis (Frank) Bannerman VI, the island’s third owner, was born March 24, 1851 in Dundee, Scotland.  His ancestor was the first to bear the honored name of Bannerman seven centuries ago.  At Bannockburn in 1314, Stirling Castle was held by the English King, Edward II.  Besieged by the Scottish army, however, Edward II’s well-trained troops were ultimately defeated in a brutal battle.  Less than half the size of England’s army, the successful brave Scotsmen were commanded by the formidable Robert the Bruce, King of Scots.  During that battle, Francis VI’s ancestor rescued their Clan Macdonald’s pennant from destruction.  In reward, Robert the Bruce is said to have torn a streamer from the Royal ensign and bestowed upon Francis’s ancestor the honor of “bannerman,” the auspicious beginning of the family name.
    Fast forward a few centuries and, interestingly, we learn that two years after the February 8, 1690 Schenectady (New York) massacre by the French and Indians, there was a similar massacre in Scotland.  Barely escaping the Feb 13, 1692 massacre of the Clan Macdonald at Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands by the Campbells, , Francis Bannerman I and others sailed to Ireland.  With the family settling in Antrim for the next 150 years or so, it was not until 1845 that Francis Bannerman V returned his branch of the family’s presence to Dundee, Scotland.  There, Francis VI was born into this distinguished family.  When but a lad of 3 years, his father brought the family across the pond to America’s shores in 1854.  Settling in Brooklyn by 1856, the Bannerman family has remained with a well-respected presence.
    Francis V earned a living by reselling items in the Brooklyn Navy Yard which he’d obtained cheaply at auctions.  A few years later, on joining the Union efforts in the Civil War, his 10-year-old son, Francis VI, left school to help support the family.  Searching for scrap items after his hours in a lawyer’s office, young Frank VI also sold newspapers to mariners on ships docked nearby.  In the evenings, he trolled or dragged local rivers and searched the streets and alleys, ever on the lookout for profitable scrap items, chains, and other odds and ends, even sections of rope, all eagerly bought by local junkmen. 
    Returning from war an injured man, Francis V saw how successful his son had become with his scrap business.  By realizing that items he sold held more value than ordinary junk, young Frank had made good money.  To handle the growing accumulations of items his son had collected, and the military surplus purchased in 1865 at the close of the Civil War, Bannerman’s storehouse was set up on Little Street.  Next, a ship-chandlery shop was established on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.  Returning to school with his father at home, young Francis received a scholarship to Cornell University.  However, owing to his father’s disability, family loyalty won out and he declined to pursue the halls of higher education in order to help run the family business.
    In 1872, 21-year-old Francis VI took a business trip to Europe.   Visiting his grandmother in Ulster, Ireland, he met Helen Boyce whom he married June 8, 1872 in Ballymena.  Two of their sons, Francis VII and David Boyce, eventually joined their father in the family business.  A third son, Walter Bruce, took a different path by earning his medical degree.  Sadly, their only daughter died as an infant.  Charles, grandson of Francis VI, married Jane Campbell, a descendant of the ancient Campbells who had attempted to destroy the Macdonald clan (from which massacre Francis I had escaped).  Their marriage showed love was the impetus to rise above the ancient rivalry between the families, reminiscent of the Appalachian’s storied Hatfields and McCoys. 
    Considered the “Father of the Army-Navy Store”, Frank Bannerman VI opened a huge block-long store on Broadway by 1897.  Here, his large building of several floors housed untold numbers of military supplies, munitions and uniforms from all around the world.  Francis/Frank was the go-to man in equipping soldiers for the Spanish-American War.  At that war’s end, the company bought arms from the Spanish government and most of the weapons which the American military had captured from the Spanish.  Printing a 300-400 page mail order catalog from the late 19th century through the mid-1960s,  collectors found a large array of military surplus and antiquities.  As city laws limited Bannerman’s ability to retain his massive holdings within the city proper, a larger facility was sought to store their collection of munitions.  
    As he relaxed by canoeing the Hudson River around this time, David Bannerman observed an inconspicuous little island.  Finding Pollepel Island perfectly suited to their needs, his father, Frank VI, approached the Taft family and purchased the island in 1900.  Designing a Scottish-style castle to honor the family’s legacy, they built an arsenal to store their vast munitions supplies, with a smaller castle providing a family residence.  On the side of the castle facing the Hudson River, “Bannerman’s Island Arsenal” is embedded in the castle façade, clearly informing all passersby of its purpose to this day.
    As the largest collector of munitions in the world, buying and selling to many nations, including Japan during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and to private citizens like you and me, even Buffalo Bill Cody, military memorabilia collectors, theatrical establishments, and artists needing props, Mr. Francis Bannerman VI held an in-depth knowledge of the military supplies and ordnance in his possession.  But, not being a man of greed, he refused to arm revolutionaries and returned their money on learning their intention.  At the opening of World War I, he reportedly shipped 8,000 saddles to the French Army and delivered thousands of rifles and ammunition to the British at no cost. 
    Though extremely successful selling munitions, Francis/Frank Bannerman VI considered himself a kind and generous man, “a man of peace”.  It was his intention that such a vast collection of arms as his would eventually be considered “The Museum of the Lost Arts.”   Energetic and devoted to his church and public service, he also taught a boys’ Sunday School class.  He enjoyed bringing friends to the island to experience his family’s hospitality.  His wife, Helen, who loved to garden, had paths and terraces constructed throughout the property.  Even today, tour guides point out the many flowers and shrubs she planted which have survived the decades, the beauty of which enhance the antiquity of the castle ruins.
    With the death of Francis Bannerman VI on November 26, 1918 at age 64, building on the island stopped and many setbacks seemed to befall his estate.  Two years later, an explosion of 200 tons of stored shells and powder destroyed part of the castle. With State and federal laws controlling the sale of munitions to civilians, sales began to plunge for Bannerman’s Arsenal.  Family continued to reside in the smaller castle on the island into the 1930s; but, for the sake of their customers, sold their goods more conveniently from a warehouse in Blue Point, Long Island into the 1970s.  In 1950, a pall fell over the island and its castle when the ferry “Pollepel” (named for the island it served) sank in a storm.  Then, when the island’s caretaker retired in 1957, Bannerman’s island remained abandoned and untended for years. 
    Frank VI’s grandson, Charles, wisely predicted in 1962  that “No one can tell what associations and incidents will involve the island in the future.  Time, the elements, and maybe even the goblins of the island will take their toll of some of the turrets and towers, and perhaps eventually the castle itself, but the little island will always have its place in history and in legend and will be forever a jewel in its Hudson Highland setting.”
    Ultimately, New York State bought the island and its buildings in 1967 after all military supplies had been removed, and tours of the island and castle commenced in 1968.  Unfortunately, a devasting fire on August 8, 1969 destroyed the Arsenal along with its walls, floors and roofs making the island unsafe, and it was closed to the public.  Though the castle now sits in ruins, much of the exterior walls are still standing, accented with climbing ivy, and held up in the weakest sections by supports.  Since virtually all interior floors and walls were destroyed by fire, “vandalism, trespass, neglect and decay”   have continued taking their toll over the decades. 
    In more recent years, the island once again made headlines with a tragic story.  On April 19, 2015, Angelika Graswald and her fiancée, Vincent Viafore, kayaked to Bannerman’s Castle Island.  Attempting to return from their outing in rough waters, Viafore’s kayak took on water and overturned, resulting in his drowning.  Graswald, charged with Viafore’s murder, admitted to removing the drain plug.  Arraigned in Goshen, Orange County, NY, a plea deal was later reached before the case went to trial.  Pleading guilty to a lesser charge of criminally negligent homicide, she was released from prison not long after, having duly served the time of her reduced sentence.
    Few people know and remember “Bannerman’s Island” during its glorious past like Jane Bannerman (wife of Charles, Francis VI’s grandson).  Assisting The Bannerman’s Castle Trust and the Taconic Park Commission to repair the buildings, Jane has noted, “…it all comes down to money, and if they don’t hurry up, it’ll all fall down.  Every winter brings more destruction.”  Unsafe conditions on and around the island are due to both underwater and land hazards, not to mention unstable castle walls.  Due to these conditions, it is advised you do not attempt to visit the island on your own.
    The Bannerman’s Castle Trust has initiated “hard hat” tours along with other entertainment venues.  By making island visits possible, it is the Trust’s hope they will be able to restore the castle, smaller castle home, and gardens for the public to enjoy more fully.  In the interest of preserving the rich history of this Scottish Castle on a small island in the Hudson River, we hope The Bannermans’ Castle Trust is successful in its restoration endeavors.
    Hudson River Cruises advertise a tour from Newburgh Landing: “Ruins of a 19th century castle on Bannerman’s Island can be seen on special guided history and walking tours departing from Newburgh Landing and Beacon.”  For information on 2-1/2 hour guided tours held May through October call:  845-220-2120 or 845-782-0685.
    With my own maternal Scots-Irish McNeill and Caldwell heritage (the Irish only because they settled in the northern Protestant section of Ireland), I was intrigued by the photos of such an old-world castle built on a small, seemingly insignificant island.  The fairy-tale ambiance of this Scottish castle stands out, visible by boat and train, amidst the New Netherlands’ Dutch influence up and down the Hudson River.  I hope someday to take a guided tour on Pollepel Island and see Bannerman’s Castle; but, for now, the photos and articles will have to do. 
    Many thanks to Will Van Dorp, a family friend from childhood, who initially piqued my interest by posting his photos and synopsis of the island, castle, and its environs on his blog, Tugster.  See Hudson Downbound 18b, April 12, 2018 - and scroll down to photo of Bannerman’s Castle prompting my story.
  6. Linda Roorda
    It’s a fact that we Americans love our 4th of July celebrations!  We especially enjoy family gatherings and picnics, and big parades with lots of floats and marching bands.  We look forward to fireworks with their beautiful colors and designs exploding in the night sky.  We decorate our homes with flags and bunting.  We salute, or respectfully place our hand over our heart, as our nation’s flag is carried past us by military veterans in parades.  And, we recall the two important founding documents of our nation: 
    1)      Preamble to the Declaration of Independence:  “…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” 
    2)      Preamble to the U.S. Constitution:  “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America…”
    What precious meaning these words have held as we take time to gaze backward to their origins, something I never tire learning about.
    As I contemplated our nation’s celebrations, I thought about the effort and sacrifice it took from many to give us the freedoms we so often take for granted.  I am so thankful for all we have in America which many around the world do not enjoy.  But I also wondered if perhaps we have forgotten all that took place a long time ago, and if this day has simply become a traditional fun holiday.  Though no nation or government has been perfect as far back as the beginning of time, the early days of a young nation’s beginnings provide perspective for today’s America, this bastion of freedom.  So, it’s fitting that we ponder what part our ancestors played in the making of our great America some 240 years ago.  And, I might add, one of the best parts of researching my ancestors was the great lasting friendships I’ve made with other descendants.
    Several of my ancestors served in the Revolutionary War in various capacities, some of whom I researched more extensively than others.  Originally, I did not plan to bring them into this article.  But then it occurred to me that would be fitting.  Knowledge of personal service and sacrifice often provides us with a greater understanding of the historical era and what our collective ancestors experienced. 
    Numerous events, political acts, and taxes over many years led to the First Continental Congress meeting from September 5 through October 2, 1774 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  It was held to counteract the British Parliament’s Coercive Acts (commonly called the Intolerable Acts by the colonists) which were intended to punish the colonists for their Tea Party held in Boston’s harbor.  
    But, among the early precipitators of the American Revolution was the import ban in 1774 against firearms and gunpowder enacted by the British government.  Next came the order to confiscate all guns and gunpowder.  The aptly named “Powder Alarm” took place on September 1, 1774 when Redcoats sailed up the Mystic River to capture hundreds of powder barrels stored in Charlestown.  Taking the event seriously, 20,000 militiamen turned out and marched to Boston.  Battle was avoided at that time, but ultimately took place the following spring at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775.  Within these events lie the foundation of our Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as written by Thomas Jefferson in 1791: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
    The Second Continental Congress began meeting in Philadelphia on May 10, 1775.  That very same day, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys seized New York’s Fort Ticonderoga from the British after traveling west from Vermont.
    On June 14, 1775, delegates from the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army from colonial militia near Boston.  The next day, they appointed an esteemed and experienced military and civic leader as commanding general of their new army, a humble man by the name of George Washington, congressman of Virginia.  Nearly a month later, Washington arrived in Boston to take command on July 3rd.  The Continental Congress then approved a Declaration of Causes on July 6th.  This proclamation outlined why the thirteen colonies should stand united against Great Britain’s political clout and military force.
    Through these early years, and with pressing urgency, the great minds of the day began formulating a bold statement of the burdens the colonists bore from an overbearing government an ocean away.  Initially, the colonists were not looking to start a war; they simply wanted their concerns heard and addressed.  But, revolt would be a relevant term regarding that which was festering.  They felt the heavy hand of tyranny over them like a smothering umbrella with their king and his government’s over-reaching philosophy of “taxation without representation.”   
    It did not take much for congressional delegates to think back and recall the Boston Massacre of March 5, 1770.  Several colonials had taunted the ever-present British soldiers.  Reinforcement soldiers shot into the crowd killing five civilians, injuring six others.  Three years later, the Tea Act in May 1773 was followed by the Boston Tea Party on December 16th.  The year 1775 began with several new tax acts put in place; labeled collectively as the Intolerable Acts, they were Britain’s answer to their colonists’ unrest.  And then an auspicious delegation met in Virginia on March 23, 1775. Those present never forgot Patrick Henry’s speech and resounding words, “Give me liberty or give me death!”
    Paul Revere’s midnight ride came the night of April 18/19, 1775 to warn of British ships arriving at Boston’s shores.  [From the interstate, I have seen Boston’s diminutive North Church tucked beneath the shadows of modern “skyscrapers,” and walked the upper and lower decks of the U.S.S. Constitution from the subsequent War of 1812 – with a sailor in period dress uniform talking on a telephone!]  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride” (“Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…”) has been said to contain many inaccuracies; in reality, it was written 80 years after Revere rode out with several others on horseback, quietly alerting other Patriots, but it may also be that Longfellow simply wrote a flowing ode to Revere with embellishments as any poet is wont to do. 
    The British government was again intent on confiscating all weapons held by the colonists.  Bands of British troops were sent to confiscate ammunition stores in Salem, Massachusetts and part of New Hampshire.  Both times, Paul Revere, a silversmith, was among members of the Sons of Liberty who alerted townsfolk in advance of enemy troops, giving them sufficient time to hide weapons and frustrate the British military.
    Desiring to alert citizens, Revere garnered assistance from Robert Newman, sexton at Boston’s North Church.  To warn that the Redcoats were coming from the shorter water route across Boston’s inner harbor, Newman hung two lanterns from the steeple window.  These lanterns were clearly seen by those in Charlestown, including the British, unfortunately.  Newman must have felt tremendous fear as the Brits attempted to break into the church while he was still there.  Reportedly, he managed to escape capture by quietly sneaking out a window near the altar moments before enemy soldiers entered the church to begin their search.  And the very next day, April 19, 1775, the Minutemen and British redcoats clashed at Lexington and Concord with “the shot heard ‘round the world.’” 
    Two months later, June 17, 1775 saw the Battle of Bunker Hill (actually Breed’s Hill) on the Charlestown Peninsula overlooking Boston.  Per military records, my ancestor John Caldwell McNeill was present as part of the Hampshire Line.  As British columns advanced toward American redoubts, the colonists were reportedly told by their commander, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!”  The British were shot virtually pointblank and hastily retreated – twice.  It was not until the third advance by the British that the inexperienced colonists lost to a superior military force.  As the colonists’ limited ammunition ran out, hand-to-hand combat took place on that third advance.  The redcoats took control with greater troop numbers despite their loss of over 1000 men, while the colonists counted over 200 killed and more than 800 wounded.  Yet, the inexperienced Americans realized their dedication and determination could overcome the superior British military which, in turn, realized this little uprising was going to bring a long and costly war to the Crown.  
    With pressure mounting, the congressional delegation met the next year in the City of Brotherly Love.  Here, they commenced to hammering out wording for what would henceforth be termed a declaration of independence. 
    “Monday, July 1, 1776, [was] a hot and steamy [day] in Philadelphia.”  In a letter to the new president of Georgia, Archibald Bulloch, John Adams wrote, “This morning is assigned the greatest debate of all.  A declaration, that these colonies are free and independent states… and this day or tomorrow is to determine its fate.  May heaven prosper the newborn republic.” (John Adams, David McCullough, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, New York, NY, 2001, p.125.)  The delegates felt the tension amongst themselves in the debates and wording of their declaration, and the voting at the end of the day was not unanimous.  Their tension was heightened that evening as news reached the city that one hundred British ships had been sighted off New York, with eventually more than 300 joining the initial fleet.  The seriousness of what they were undertaking was felt by every man in the delegation for they knew their very lives were on the line.
    July 2nd saw an overcast day with cloudbursts letting loose as the delegates met.  The New York delegates abstained from voting while others joined the majority to make a unanimous decision.  Thus, on July 2, 1776, twelve colonies voted to declare independence from Britain.  More than anyone else, John Adams made it happen.  His elation showed in writing home about the proceedings to his wife, Abigail.  “The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America.  I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.  It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty.  It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more.”  (McCullough, pp. 129-130)
    News spread like wildfire throughout Philadelphia.  A young artist, Charles Willson Peale, journaled that “This day the Continental Congress declared the United Colonies Free and Independent States.”  (McCullough, p.130)   But, Congress still had to review what the delegation had written before an official statement could be made.
    July 3rd blessed the city with a drop of 10 degrees following cloudbursts the day before.  Tensions had even begun to ease among the men, but still there was much work to be done.  More discussion and deliberation ensued as they reviewed the language of their declaration.  (McCullough, pp. 130-135)  Much had to be cut and reworded to make it a more concise document which then boldly declared, “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.  When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” 
    Benjamin Franklin offered encouraging and comforting words to the now-silent Thomas Jefferson whose many words were debated and cut.  When their work was finished, it was still Thomas Jefferson’s words, however, which have held a firm and tender spot in the hearts of Americans ever since.  To Jefferson goes the credit for writing “…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”  (McCullough, p.130-136)  
    Thursday, July 4, 1776, dawned cool and comfortable.  The tension was gone from the weather just as it was now from among the men of the delegation.  Discussions were again held through late morning when a final vote was taken.  New York still abstained, but the other twelve colonies voted unanimously to support the hard work they had wrought in this Declaration of Independence.  Ultimately, the delegates from all thirteen colonies, including New York, signed the document in solidarity. (McCullough, p. 136)
    Celebrations began on the 8th when the published Declaration was read to the public.  Thirteen cannon blasts reverberated throughout Philadelphia, bells rang day and night, bonfires were lit everywhere, and candles shone bright in windows.  The news reached Washington and his troops in New York City the next day where the Declaration was read.  More celebrations sprang up as the crowds pulled down the equestrian statue of King George III.  (McCullough, p.136-137)  But, their elation was not long in lasting.
    In reality, it would be several more years before celebrations of this magnitude would again be held.  In reality, though the hard work of writing such a declaration was finally completed, even harder efforts and sacrifices of thousands of men and boys on battlefields were about to begin.  In reality, the conflict about to begin would affect every man, woman and child living within the thirteen colonies in ways they could never have imagined.  And, ultimately, their great sacrifices gave rise to the freedoms which we enjoy and tend to take for granted today.
    The lives of the men who signed this declaration were also forever affected.  If the new America lost its war for independence, every signer of said document faced charges of treason and death by hanging for actions against their king.  In signing, they gave “support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, [as] we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” 
    There were 56 representatives from all thirteen colonies who signed, ranging in age from 26 to 70 (the oldest being the esteemed Benjamin Franklin).  Over half were lawyers, but the men included planters, merchants and shippers.  Most of them were wealthy men who had much to lose should Britain win.  Though none of them died at the hand of the enemy, four men were taken captive during the war by the British, with one-third of the signers being military officers during the war.  And, nearly all of them were poorer when the war ended than when it began. 
    There was much at stake in the days and years ahead after the Declaration of Independence was signed and the war began in earnest.  Some men abandoned the battle lines, their friends, and what once seemed like worthy ideals, and simply walked home.  Many suffered untold pain and suffering as prisoners of war.  Many suffered deprivations of food and clothing along with disease and death within their own military camps.  Many fought family and friends in the same community as Patriot was pitted against Tory, i.e. Loyalist.  Schoharie County, New York, considered by historians to be “The Breadbasket of the Revolution,” provided an abundance of food for Washington’s northern troops.  To frustrate the colonists’ efforts, the British and their Loyalist supporters, including many Native Americans, destroyed and burned crops and buildings as they captured, killed and scalped settlers throughout the Mohawk and Schoharie Valley and along the western frontier during the war. 
    In reality, however, we likely would not have won our independence if it were not for Washington’s spies.  Barely two months after the Declaration was signed, a 21-year-old Yale graduate by the name of Nathan Hale from Massachusetts eagerly volunteered to spy for Washington.  He intended to go behind enemy lines on Long Island and in New York City to infiltrate the British strongholds.  Instead, not being sufficiently familiar with the area and its people, and likely having a New England accent, he was caught and found to have sketches of fortifications and memos about troop placements on him.  Without benefit of legal trial, he was sentenced to death.  His requests for a clergyman and a Bible were refused.  Just before being hung on September 22, 1776 in the area of 66th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan, Hale was heard to say with dignity, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”  (George Washington’s Secret Six, Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger, Penguin Group, New York, NY, 2013, p.1.)
    George Washington knew that he desperately needed spies, but he needed them to work in such a way that they would not be discovered.  His tender heart for his fellow countrymen deplored that even one should die for the cause of freedom.  Yet, he also knew that such loss was inevitable.  And, thus was born Washington’s spies so aptly named, “The Secret Six.”
    Out of the realization that Gen. George Washington desperately needed spies, and hating to lose even one more life after the hanging of Nathan Hale, a ring of trustworthy spies was gradually pulled together.  Washington’s “Secret Six” included five men and one woman embedded within and around New York City and Long Island, each familiar with the land and its people.  They reported to Washington on British movements and military plans in a timely fashion. 
    Because they knew the area, and were known by the people, they were readily accepted as they maneuvered amongst the enemy.  That is not to say, however, that they didn’t come close to being found out.  They lived in constant fear of such, not to mention the fear of losing their own lives and destroying their families in the process.  At times they were emotionally frail, depressed and despondent.  But, because of their passion for the freedom movement afoot, they came together for the greater benefit of all.
    At one point, Washington’s army was entirely surrounded by the British in New York City.  With tips from his spies, and being a man given to much time and prayer with God, his troops managed to quietly evacuate the city under the cover of night at an area not under guard.  With dawn, however, came the realization that a large contingent still remained behind and would be very visible to the enemy.  An answer to prayer was soon forthcoming to allow the balance of his men and equipment to leave the city – an unexpected and extremely dense morning fog enveloped the area, allowing them to continue crossing safely over into Jersey with the British unable to do anything about the Continental Army’s escape from their clutches. 
    Because of the work of Washington’s spies and the “important memos” he managed to have planted with false information behind enemy lines, the Americans were able to surprise the enemy at Trenton, New Jersey on Christmas Day night 1776 after the British had relaxed their guard and celebrated the day in style.  Needless to say, the Americans enjoyed a vital and rousing victory.
    Because of the spies and their efforts, accomplished with great fear for their own lives and that of their families, warning was given to Washington of 400 ships arriving from England.  The spies’ insider knowledge that the British were planning to attack and scuttle the French ships and troops coming to Washington’s aid allowed him to turn the tide in a timely manner.  He was able to fool the British into thinking he was readying an imminent attack on New York City, causing them to leave Long Island Sound, thus allowing the French time to land and move inland to safety in Connecticut without battling the British at sea before they even disembarked.
    Because of the spy who owned a print shop which seemingly supported King George, important plans were heard and passed on to Washington.  Other spies were privy to the upper level of command amongst the British military at parties in a particular merchandise shop and a certain coffeehouse.  A circuitous route was set up for their messenger across Long Island to Setauket where packets with concealed or innocuous-looking papers written in invisible ink and code were rowed to the Connecticut shore in a whale boat (while being pursued by the British) where another member took the seemingly innocent packet of merchandise and rode his horse overland to Washington’s camp in New Jersey.  At times, someone simply traveled out of New York City to visit relatives in northern New Jersey and met up with another dependable link to pass the information along to Washington’s headquarters.
    Because of their courage and resolve, the spies assisted in uncovering the Crown’s Major John Andre` (who, himself, ran a British spy ring) as he worked with Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, American commander at West Point.  Despite a prior stellar military record, but due to personal bitterness, Arnold was in the process of handing West Point over to Andre` and the British.  Through a series of blundering mistakes, because of the spies’ knowledge given to Washington at just the right moment, and because of the quick thinking of a couple of patriotic guards on a bridge leading back into New York City, Andre` was captured and later executed.  Arnold’s hand-over was thus thwarted, although Arnold managed to escape behind enemy lines and ultimately fled to England.
    Because of the supposed loyal British support by the owner of said print shop, a little book was obtained through his work as an undercover spy.  This inconspicuous little book contained key information on British troop movements at Yorktown, Virginia.  With important knowledge gained of the enemy’s military plans, Washington was able to redirect appropriate troops and ships to Yorktown.  General Cornwallis surrendered for the British on October 19, 1781 in an American victory where total defeat for the Americans would have otherwise taken place. 
    Because they swore themselves to secrecy, no one knew the full involvement of all six spies, nor all of their names.  Only gradually over the last few hundred years has their identities become known, the fifth not confirmed until recently.  All five men are now known, but the woman’s identity is not; she is simply known as Agent 355.  It is believed she was captured and became a prisoner; but, there is no hard evidence by research even to prove that conjecture. 
    The efforts of the six spies as they secretly obtained information and passed it along (devising their own specialty codes, using a unique invisible ink, and more) enabled them to maintain total secrecy.  Nor did they ever seek accolades for their work after the war was over.  The secrets to their successful accomplishments have been among the methods still taught and used successfully by our CIA today.
    In the interest of sharing the spies’ courage which undoubtedly helped us win the Revolutionary War, their story (as briefly described above) has been extensively researched and written by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger in George Washington’s Secret Six, The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution.  It was one of my Christmas gifts from my husband a few years ago, and I highly recommend it to other history buffs.  It’s a read you’ll find difficult to set down!
    While researching my ancestry over 20 years ago, I purchased Revolutionary War pension application files of several ancestors who had served.  For those whose government files I did not purchase, their data was obtained from Schoharie County Historical Society, various Revolutionary War books, CDs, and documents proving their service.  Hoping that my family research might provide us a closer glimpse of the war through their experiences, I share their legacy.
    1) Frantz/Francis Becraft/Beacraft, bp. 06/12/1761, Claverack, Columbia Co., NY - Private, 3rd Comp., 3rd Regiment, 1st Rensselaerswyck Battalion, Albany County New York Militia, on muster roll from Berne in 1782, 1790 census at Berne.  In an 1839 affidavit, Francis Becraft of Berne stated that he “served as a Private in a company commanded by Capt. Adam Dietz in the County of Albany...” Frantz/Francis married Catherine Dietz (sister of said Capt. Adam Dietz), my g-g-g-g-grandparents.
    In researching my ancestors, I discovered an apparent familial tie to the notorious Tory Becraft/Beacraft.  This man felt no remorse in aligning himself with Joseph Brant’s Indians to capture, kill and scalp Patriots throughout Schoharie County, known to have brutally killed and scalped a young boy in the Vrooman family who managed to escape the house after his family had been murdered.  After the war ended, Becraft/Beacraft had the audacity to return from Canada to Schoharie County where he was immediately captured by ten men.  In meting out a punishment of 50 lashes by whip, the men supposedly reminded him of his infamous acts against the community, his former neighbors.  Roscoe notes that death did not linger for him after the final lash, and his ashes were buried on the spot.  Of the ten men who swore themselves to secrecy, apparently only five are known.  (History of Schoharie County, William E. Roscoe, pub. D. Mason & Comp., 1882, pp.250-251.)  
    However, in "Families (to 1825) of Herkimer, Montgomery, & Schoharie, N.Y.," a genealogical source on many early families by William V. H. Barker, it is noted that the Tory Becraft/Beacraft was Benjamin, born about 1759, brother of my ancestor noted above, Frantz/Francis Becraft.  If this is accurate and they are indeed brothers, they were both sons of Willem/William and Mareitje (Bond) Becraft.  Another source, “The Life of Joseph Brant – Thayendanegea…” notes Becraft survived his whipping and left the area (pg. 64), just as other undocumented sources indicate he survived and returned to Canada to live with his family.  So, I am uncertain as to whether Tory [Benjamin] Becraft actually died from his whippings or survived and left the area.
    2) Johannes/John Berlet/Berlett/Barlet, b. 05/08/1748, Schoharie, Schoharie Co., NY – Private, Tryon County Militia, 3rd Reg’t, Mohawk District.  He married Maria Gardinier, b. about 1751; their daughter Eva/Eveline Barlett married Martin Tillapaugh, b. 1778, my g-g-g-grandparents.
    3) Johann Hendrich/John Henry Dietz, bp 05/10/1722, Nordhofen, Vielbach, Germany – served in Lt. John Veeder’s Company, Rensselaerswyck, later under Capt. Sternberger’s Company at Schoharie.  He married Maria Elisabetha Ecker, bp. 1725; their daughter Catherine Dietz, b. 1761, married Frantz/Francis Beacraft above, my g-g-g-g-grandparents.
    As per my research article on Chemung County’s Newtown Battle, the Indian/Loyalist raids and massacres also touched my ancestral families in New York.  In Beaverdam (now Berne), New York near the Switzkill River on September 1, 1781, the Johannes Dietz family was attacked.  Johannes’ son, Capt. William Dietz was captured and forced to watch his elderly parents, wife, four young children and a Scottish maid be killed and scalped.  (see “Old Hellebergh,” Arthur B. Gregg, The Altamont Enterprise Publishers, Altamont, N.Y., 1936, p. 24; signed by Gregg, in Roorda’s collection from her father.)  Capt. William Dietz’s father, Johannes, was an older brother of my ancestor noted above, Johann Hendrich/John Henry Dietz. 
    4) Johan Dietrich Dallenbach/John Richard Dillenbach, b. 1733 per cemetery records, Stone Arabia, NY; father Jorg Martin Dallenbach born Lauperswil, Bern, Switzerland, emigrated with 1710 German Palatines.  John Richard Dillenbach married Maria Mynard; their son Martinus took name of Martin Tillapaugh (my lineage), married Eva/Eveline Barlett as above.  Dillenbach reported for duty March 20, 1757 when Sir William Johnson called local militia out to protect Fort William Henry on Lake George for the British.  The Seven Years’ War, or the French and Indian War, began in 1754 and ended with the European peace treaties of 1763 during which year Dillenbach again reported to defend Herkimer with the Palatine District Regiment.
    James Fennimore Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans about the siege of Fort William Henry.  Roughly 2300 colonial troops were protecting the British fort when the French arrived with about 8000 troops in August 1763 and heavily bombarded the fort.  With additional supporting troops not found to be on their way, the garrison was forced to surrender.  The men were to be protected as they retreated by generous treaty terms.  However, as the Indians entered the fort, they plundered, looted, scalped and killed about 200 colonials, many of them too sick to leave.  In desecrating graves of those who had died before the siege, the Indians exposed themselves to smallpox, taking the germs back to their homes.  The French destroyed the fort before returning to Canada.  Fort William Henry was reconstructed in the 1950s.  Visiting this fort in 1972 with the Lounsberry Methodist Church youth group, I was unaware at the time that my Dallenbach/Tillapaugh ancestor had walked that ground, having been involved in the siege and survived. 
    5) Timothy Hutton, b.11/24/1746, New York City.  He married 2nd) Elizabeth Deline b.1760.  Their son George b.1787 married Sarah Wyckoff b.1793, my g-g-g-grandparents.  Timothy served as Ensign in Philip Schuyler’s Regiment of Albany County Militia, at defeat of Gen. Burgoyne in Saratoga October 17, 1777; appointed Lieutenant in New York Levies under Col. Marinus Willett; defended Schoharie County from burnings and killings by British, Loyalists and Indians.  This Timothy is not to be confused with a nephew of same name and rank, b. 1764, which many have done, including an erroneous grave marker in Carlisle, New York.  Sorting their military service out was part of my extensive thesis and documentation in researching and publishing two lengthy articles on the origins and descendants of this Hutton family in the New York Genealogical & Biographical Record in 2004-2005. 
    My Timothy’s nephew William Hutton served extensively in the Revolutionary War throughout New York City, Long Island, and the Hudson Valley.  My Timothy’s nephew Christopher Hutton of Troy, NY served as Ensign, promoted to Lieutenant, member of the elite Society of the Cincinnati.  My Timothy’s nephew, Timothy Hutton b.1764, served as Lieutenant in New York Levies under Col. Willett, enlisting 1780 at age 16 in the Albany militia.  My Timothy’s nephews, Isaac and George (brothers of Christopher and the younger Timothy, all sons of George Hutton, the older brother of my ancestor Timothy Hutton), were well-known influential silversmiths during the Federal period in the late 18th/early 19th centuries in Albany.  Hutton silver is on display at museums in Albany, New York.
    6) Johannes Leenderse (John Leonardson), b.06/18/63, Fonda, Montgomery Co., NY - enlisted as private in 1779 at age 16, Tryon County Militia, 3rd Reg’t; Corporal in 1781; served on many expeditions in the Mohawk Valley and at forts; joined Col. Willett’s company on march to Johnstown October 1781 in successful battle against enemy who had burned and killed throughout Mohawk Valley; re-enlisted 1782.  Married Sarah Putman b.1773.  Their son Aaron Leonardson b.1796 married 3rd) Lana Gross, parents of Mary Eliza Leonardson b. about 1732 who married William Henry Ottman, my g-g-grandparents.
    7) John Caldwell McNeill, b. 1755, Londonderry, Rockingham Co., NH - at Bunker Hill (actually Breed’s Hill) on Charlestown June 17, 1775.  As Sergeant under Col. Timothy Bedel of the New Hampshire Line, John bought beef to pasture and butcher as needed for the troops.  Bedel’s regiment joined “Corp.1, Co. 1, New York Reg’t” on mission to Canada against British; taken captive with his cousins and friends at The Cedars near Montreal, an island in the St. Lawrence; soldiers were stripped of clothing, belongings and food, and released in cartel negotiated by Gen. Benedict Arnold before he became a traitor.  John served at and discharged at Saratoga, NY.  He married Hannah Caldwell b.1762; removed to Carlisle, Schoharie County, New York ca. 1794; their son Jesse McNeill m. Elizabeth Ostrom, my g-g-g-grandparents.
    😎 George Richtmyer, bp 04/23/1738, Albany Co., NY – Captain from 1775 through end of war in 15th Reg’t of Albany Militia, defending Cobleskill and Middleburg, Schoharie Co., NY.  Married Anna Hommel; their son Henrich/Henry married Maria Beacraft (see above), my g-g-g-grandparents.
    9) Hendrick/Henry Vonck/Vunck, b. 03/06/1757, Freehold, Monmouth Co., NJ - served as private and Corporal in New Jersey and New York City; carried papers for American Gen. Charles Lee; joined units marching to same area of Canada as John C. McNeill; on return became ill with smallpox with others at Lake George when news of the Declaration of Independence was made; honorably discharged; called to serve again at Sandy Hook, NJ; captured by the British at Sandy Hook, taken to a prison ship, then to the [Livingston] stone sugar house in Manhattan, then another prison ship, the Good___  (writing illegible on the early 1800s pension document, possibly Good Hope).  After “one year and one month” as prisoner, he was exchanged and released.  “Having suffered while a prisoner great privations and disease and in poor clothing and severely unwholesome provisions many prisoners died in consequence of their treatment.” (Per 1832 affidavit of military service for pension.)  Conditions suffered as a prisoner left Henry in poor health the rest of his life; removing later to Montgomery County, NY.  Married Chestinah Hagaman; their daughter Jane Vunck married James Dingman, my g-g-g-grandparents.
    From 1776 to 1783 the British made use of decommissioned ships (those incapable of going to sea) as floating prisons.  At least 16 rotting hulks were moored in Wallabout Bay, the inner harbor along the northwest shore of Brooklyn, now part of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.  Among the ships were the Good Hope, Whitby, The Prince of Wales, Falmouth, Scorpion, Stromboli, Hunter, and the most infamous HMS Jersey, nicknamed Hell by the men. (see websites below.)  Over 10,000 men, perhaps at least 11,500, died on these ships due to the deliberate deplorable conditions.  Men were crammed below decks with no windows for lighting or fresh air.  There was a lack of food and clothing, with vermin and insects running rampant, and a lack of other humane efforts to aid the ill, all leading to the death of thousands.
    Prisoners died virtually every day, reportedly as many as fifteen a day.  Some were not found right away, their bodies not disposed of until days later.  Often, those who died were sewn into their blankets (if they had one) to await pick up by cart the next morning.  Many were buried in shallow graves along the shore (unearthed during major storms) or were simply tossed overboard, later washing ashore.  With development of Walloon Bay area over the last two centuries has come the discovery of their bones and parts of ships.  To commemorate these soldiers’ lives and what they gave in the fight for independence, the Prison Ship Martyrs’ Monument was built.  Located in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, it was dedicated on April 6, 1808 with improvements made to it several times since.  
    At least another 5-6000 men died in the sugar houses, bringing the total who died as prisoners to more than 17,500 in the sugar houses and ships, more than double the battlefield losses.  Sugar houses were buildings meant to store sugar and molasses.  Affidavits by my ancestor, Henry Vunck, and friends note he was held for a few months in the “stone sugar house.”  This could only mean the Livingston Sugar House, a six-story stone building built in 1754 by the Livingston family on Crown (now Liberty) Street in Manhattan.  Demolished in 1846, buildings No. 34 and 36 are now on the site.  
    A second sugar house, the Rhinelander, a five-story brick warehouse, was built in 1763 at Rose (now William) Street and Duane Street.  This building was eventually replaced and is now the headquarters of the New York City Police Department.  A third, Van Cortlandt’s sugar house, was built about 1755 by the early Dutch family of this name at the northwest corner of the Trinity Church in Manhattan.  It was demolished in 1852.  
    10) Hans Georg Jacob Dubendorffer (George Jacob Diefendorf), b. 01/23/1729, Basserstorff, Switzerland – a Loyalist during Rev War, he left Mohawk Valley for Philadelphia and New York City, returned to a daughter’s home in Canajoharie, NY after the war rather than remove to Canada.  A patriotic son disowned his father, taking his middle name (his mother’s maiden name) as his new surname, removing to Virginia.  George Jacob married Catharine Hendree; their son Jacob Diefendorf married Susanna Hess, my g-g-g-g-grandparents.
    On February 3, 1783, the British government acknowledged the independence of the American colonies.  The next day, they formally agreed to halt all military operations.  A preliminary peace treaty was ratified in April, and Canada offered free land that summer to Loyalists who sought a new life.  Still, the British military maintained a presence in Manhattan.  When Britain signed the Treaty of Paris September 3, 1783 to end the war, the hated Redcoats finally and slowly began to abandon their New York City stronghold. 
    Next would begin the task of establishing the government and president of this new nation, the United States of America.  George Washington rode into Manhattan on November 25, 1783 with his officers and troops, eight horses abreast.  At the same time Washington’s parade began, British soldiers and ships were setting sail for their homeland. 
    Flags were joyfully waved, church bells rang in celebration, and cannons were fired in honor of those who had fought and for those who had given their lives, all for the independence of this fledgling nation.  The war had definitely taken its toll; but, on this day, great joy was felt in every heart for what had been accomplished.  And that is why we continue to celebrate our 4th of July heritage in style – as we remember and commemorate those who gave so much that we might enjoy so much.  And, may we will never forget what their efforts wrought for us.
    (Data sources available upon request.)
  7. Linda Roorda
    Many communities in states above the Mason-Dixon line had safe homes to assist slaves fleeing north to freedom, like Portland, Maine.  A center of activity, the city was important to blacks fleeing slavery for not only safe homes enroute to Canada, but also employment in the rail and shipping industries.
    Recently, I learned from friends near Portland, Maine that the city’s Underground Railroad Abyssinian Meeting House/Church, built during 1828-1831, is undergoing restoration.  Noted to be “Maine’s oldest African-American church building and third oldest [standing African-American meeting house] in the nation”, it held worship services, abolition and temperance meetings, Portland Union Anti-Slavery Society, a school for blacks from 1846 until the 1856, and much more.  Recognized as Maine’s only Underground Railroad site by the National Park Service, it is also on the National Register of Historic Places.  (Wikipedia)
    The Abyssinian church was dealt a devastating blow, however, when the SS Portland sank off Cape Ann in 1898, taking 17 male parishioners.  One of New England’s largest ocean steamers with side-mount paddlewheels, she provided a luxury service for passengers between Boston, MA and Portland, ME.  When the powerful “Portland Gale” blizzard struck the New England coast November 26-27, 1898, more than 400 people and 150 vessels were lost.  (Wikipedia)
    Locally, Tioga County, New York can also claim involvement in the Underground Railroad.  But, as historian, Ed Nizalowski, noted online, “…as is the case in so many other parts of the country, actual documentation and credible evidence for involvement can be very difficult to verify.”  According to Nizalowski, Hammon Phinney of the Baptist Church in Owego, NY was a strong leader among local abolitionists.  Meetings in Owego, as elsewhere, throughout the 1830s and 1840s were rife with “wild confusion and violence.”  Frederick Douglass was forced to cancel speaking engagements “for fear of his physical safety” in 1840, though he did return in 1857, and Garret/Gerrit Smith was hit with eggs. 
    Nizalowski’s research uncovered four homes on Front Street in Owego which are known to have been involved in the Underground Railroad – Nos. 100, 294, 313, and 351.  “At 294 Front Street, a building once owned by the Eagles Club, a brick lined tunnel had been found running along the north wall.”  He also stated that No. 351 Main Street “has the best evidence for being a station for fugitive slaves.”  It was owned previously by Judge Farrington, “a prominent Abolitionist,” and by Hammon Phinney, with the house having “a hidden space in the cellar.”  Nizalowski avers that Phinney’s work as a stationmaster was learned primarily when the property was sold.  “In 1867 when the Hastings family bought the property from Frederick Phinney, Hammon's son, the new owners were told that the home had served as a station for fugitive slaves.  This story was passed on for over 100 years.  The best evidence for Hammon being a stationmaster comes from his obituary that appeared on March 3, 1898 where it also states that his home served as a station.  This is one of the few written references from the 19th century identifying a specific individual.” 
    Tioga County homes in Newark Valley, Berkshire and Richford may well have been involved in the Underground Railroad as Nizalowski pointed out.  There may have been additional safe houses in local communities. Though I have heard of homes used for the Underground Railroad in our town of Spencer, NY, I have no personal knowledge.  I do know the McQuigg house built in 1830s where our house stands today had servants’ quarters; whether they were whites or free blacks I have no knowledge.  At the far eastern corner of the kitchen was a staircase with a door. Taking the stairs up, there was an open area with two separate rooms and a small sitting area, closed off from the other rooms by a different type of door with a different type of latch. Sadly, since the house foundation beams had dry rot, and the structure itself was caving in, the house was not deemed appropriate for renovation by our bank.
    Typically, local history is only gained through stories passed down within families which attest to involvement in the underground.  But there was definitely assistance and support for abolition work throughout our region of New York state, both financially and physically.
    Writing in 2002 for Elmira’s “The Jones Museum” website, Barbara S. Ramsdell quoted Arch Merrill’s book, “The Underground, Freedom’s Road, and Other Upstate Tales.”  “Jones quietly took command of the Underground in Elmira, a gateway between the South and the North.  It became the principal station on the ‘railroad’ between Philadelphia and the Canadian border.  Jones worked closely with William Still, the chief Underground agent in Philadelphia, who forwarded parties of from six to 10 fugitives at a time to Elmira...  The station master concealed as many as 30 slaves at one time in his home, exactly where he never told.  He carried on his operations so secretly that only the inner circle of abolitionists knew that in a decade he dispatched nearly 800 slaves to Canada.”  
    As noted in Part III, I had discovered while researching and reading various books and websites that the Abolitionist Movement and the Underground Railroad are intertwined with the beginnings of the Women’s Rights Movement.  It was a time in history when many good people of faith were not inclined to confront the evils of slavery; it was just the normal way of life, or so they believed.  And, for the most part, it was felt that the place of women was in the home or in limited occupations, often not even given as good an education as their brothers.  It was an era when those opposed to owning another human clashed definitively with those opposed to slavery’s demise. 
    Though slavery has been around since early historical times, even in Biblical history, how thankful we are that some felt a calling in their heart to honor God’s love for all by working tirelessly to free those in slavery.  Were it not for the ardent religious beliefs, persistence and sacrifices of the abolitionists, men and women, white and black, who carried on their work despite great opposition, slavery might have lasted far longer in this nation than it actually did… and thank God it did come to an end.
    Yet, as stated in my preface, slavery is still a lucrative venture around the world, including in our own America.  Under various guises, slavery flourishes in over 100 countries with India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, and North Korea topping the lists… all for the financial profits gained.  Adult and child sex trafficking (especially of women and young girls), drug trafficking, forced child labor, debt bondage, unlawful recruitment of children for war, and domestic service slavery, are just  a few of the repulsive categories.
    I began this series by noting Martin Luther King, Jr. had said, “We are determined to work and fight until justice rains down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”  Paraphrasing Amos 5:24, King did just that with God at his side to challenge us to seek justice.  May we do the same.  Never forgetting, we do not erase history.  Without the knowledge and ability to learn from injustice, we are destined to repeat.
    Knowing slavery continues in our world today, may we have hearts that care enough to help in some way.  One avenue we can take to help stop enslavement is by donating to a charity of our choice which specifically works to educate the public and free those held in bondage.  For example, our charity of choice is Samaritan’s Purse, begun by Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham.
    Among the innumerable famous and little-known Blacks who have brought betterment to our world are the following few:
    1. George Washington Carver (1864-1943) – born into slavery, an artist, botanist, teacher, agricultural scientist and inventor with extensive research on over 300 uses for peanuts; created Tuskegee Institute Movable School to teach modern agricultural techniques and tools to farmers in Alabama and around the world.
    2. Edward Bouchet (1852-1918) - son of former enslaved parent, removed to New Haven, CT; accepted at Yale, first African American to earn a Ph.D., 6th American to earn this degree in physics.
    3. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (1745?-1818) – from Haiti, first to establish a permanent settlement at Chicago, a man of great reputable character and business acumen.
    4. Matthew Alexander Henson (1866-1955) - son of free-born tenant farmers; ran away from abusive home at 11; traveled with Robert Peary in 1891 on first of several trips to Greenland; Peary and Henson took their final trip in 1909; Henson set foot on North Pole first; returning home, Peary took all credit with Henson’s achievements ignored as a Black man.
    5. Bessie Coleman (1892 -1926) - one of 13 children born to Indigenous father and African American mother; educating herself, graduated from high school; not accepted at flight school being black and female, saved money for training in France; first Black woman to earn her pilot’s license in the world.
    6. Lewis Latimer (1848-1928) - son of self-liberated parents, Chelsea, MA; served in U.S. Navy during Civil War; a draftsman with numerous inventions, including filament system to keep carbon filament in lightbulbs lasting longer, only Black member of Thomas Edison’s elite team; improved design of railroad car bathroom and early air conditioning unit.
    7. Jane Bolin (1908-2007) - first Black woman graduate of Yale Law School; first Black woman judge in 1939; with Eleanor Roosevelt, created intervention program to keep young boys from committing crimes.
    8. Alice Allison Dunnigan (1906-1983) – first African-American female White House correspondent; first Black female in Senate and House of Representatives press corps; chief of Associated Negro Press in 1947; served under Pres. John F. Kennedy as education consultant for President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity until 1965.
    9. Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) - first Black woman to win 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for environmental work in Kenya; social, environmental and political activist; founded Green Belt Movement, planting trees.
    10. Irene Morgan Kirkaldy (1907-2007) – July 1944 arrested for refusing to give up bus seat in Virginia; convicted in County Circuit Court, appealed decision to Virginia Supreme Court; Supreme Court ruled in her favor June 3, 1946 aided by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.
    11. Claudette Colvin (1939-) - 15-year-old who refused to give up bus seat March 2, 1955, arrested 9 months before Rosa Parks; main witness in federal suit, Browder v. Gayle, ending public transportation segregation in Alabama.
    12. Amelia Boynton Robinson (1911-2015) - tireless advocate for civil rights; first African-American woman in Alabama to run for Congress in 1964; worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. to plan march from Selma to Montgomery on March 7, 1965, severely injured; received Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom Medal in 1990.
    13. Rebecca Lee Crumpler (1831-1895) - earned MD in 1864, first African-American woman physician in U.S.; wrote and published “Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts”, first medical text authored by African-American.
    14. Otis Boykin (1920-1982) – with 26 patents, developed IBM computers, and circuitry improvements for pacemakers.
    15. Charles Drew (1904-1950) – physician, surgeon, medical researcher with discoveries in blood transfusions, developed large-scale blood banks, blood plasma programs, and bloodmobiles for Red Cross.
    16. Jesse Ernest Wilkins, Jr. (1923-2011) – a genius, youngest student ever at age 13 to enter University of Chicago, earning bachelor, master, and doctorate degree in math at age 19; nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer and mathematician; published papers in mathematics, optics, and nuclear engineering; perfected lens design in microscopes and ophthalmologic uses; involved in Manhattan Project with future Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner with significant contributions to nuclear-reactor physics.
    17.“Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race” is a 2016 nonfiction book by Margot Lee Shetterly. It tells about the lives of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, three mathematicians who worked as computers (then a job description) at NASA during the space race. They overcame discrimination to solve problems for engineers and others at NASA. For the first years of their careers, the workplace was segregated and women were kept in the background as human computers. Author Shetterly's father was a research scientist at NASA who worked with many of the book's main characters. These three historical women overcame discrimination and racial segregation to become American achievers in mathematics, scientific and engineering history. The main character, Katherine Johnson, calculated rocket trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions. Johnson successfully "took matters into her own hands" by being assertive with her supervisor; when her mathematical abilities were recognized, Katherine Johnson was allowed into all male meetings at NASA.  (Wikipedia)
    BOOKS I’VE READ:
    *Abide With Me, A Photographic Journey Through Great British Hymns, by John H. Parker, New Leaf Press, Green Forest, AR, 2009.
    *Bound for Canaan, The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement, by Fergus M. Bordewich, HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, 2005.
    *Gateway to Freedom, by Eric Foner, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2015.
    *Harriet Tubman, Conductor on the Underground Railroad, by Ann Petry, Harper Trophy of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., New York, NY, 1955.
    *The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto, Vintage Books Edition, New York, NY, 2005.
    A FEW OF MY WEBSITE SOURCES:
    *“Absence of Malice” (Adapted from “Lincoln’s Greatest Speech:  The Second Inaugural” by Ronald C. White, Jr.) in Smithsonian, April 2002, p.119.
    *“The Underground Railroad in Tioga County, A Piece of History With Many Gaps to Fill” by Ed Nizalowski.
    *John W. Jones Museum, Elmira, NY - “Our purpose is to preserve… related artifacts in memory of his role and the roles of others in the Southern Tier involved in the Underground Railroad and the American Civil War.”
    *Freedom Quilts – “The History of The American Quilt: Part One (Early African American Quilts) - Pattern Observer. History of the American quilt” by Molly Williams.
  8. Linda Roorda
    My first personal-interview article originally published as front-page article in the local newspaper, Broader View Weekly, March 21, 2013:
    “It’s all up to Mother Nature,” said Al Smith.  When the days begin to get longer and stay above 32 degrees, but nights are below freezing, the sap begins to flow.  And it’s then we start to see those long lines of plastic tubing snaking between maple trees in the woods as we drive by.  Did you know it takes about 30 to 50 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of delicious pure maple syrup?
    While a number of maple syrup producers locally have been in the business for decades, for brothers Allan and Albert Smith, Jr. (formerly Smith Brothers Maple Syrup, now Smith Family Maple Products), the sugaring fever hit in their teens.  And they come by it naturally.  Their grandfather, Dayton Smith, his brother Ben, and Dayton’s son Albert Sr. (the twins’ father), operated a small evaporator in the early 1970s.  Ben’s father-in-law, Aubrey Westervelt, had been sugaring for decades.  So, it was only natural the Smiths used his sugar bush, tapping about 250 trees annually with spile and bucket, trees still used by the younger generation.  Dayton, Ben and Albert’s initial evaporator was set up in a garage for a couple years.  Then, Dayton bought a commercial 2x6 evaporator and set it up at Ben’s farm on Sabin Road.  After operating for a few more years, selling by word of mouth, they ended the labor-intensive syrup production and sold their equipment.
    A favorite family story is told of a time Dayton, Ben, and Albert, Sr. went to a meeting at Cornell University’s Research Center.  They brought along a bottle of their maple syrup to show what they’d been up to in the little farming town of Spencer.  On showing their light golden syrup to the Cornell gentlemen, one of the Smiths wryly asked, “Do you know how much brown sugar we need to add to make the color darker?” And a hearty laugh was shared by all!

     
    Having grown up with sugaring in the family, Allan Smith decided to build a small homemade evaporator in 1992 for his B.O.C.E.S shop class.  With twin brother Albert’s help, they set it up in an old woodshed to see if they could actually make syrup.  One day, grandfather Dayton happened to visit and discovered the boys’ secret.  Seeing their homemade evaporator, he got excited and motivated them to continue their endeavors.  The following season, Dayton purchased a 2x6 commercial evaporator for them.  They boiled sap the old way, using about a wheelbarrow load of well-seasoned firewood every 15-20 minutes.  It took roughly an hour to make about one gallon of syrup.  As Smith Brothers Maple Syrup, the brothers tapped annually, selling by word of mouth just as the older generation had done.
    In 2010, Allan and Albert, Jr. sold their old equipment and purchased a 2-1/2 x 10 natural gas fired evaporator, capable of producing about 8-9 gallons of syrup per hour.  With this expansion in the family business, they changed their name to Smith Family Maple Products.  In 2011, they remodeled an old machine shed on their parents’ property into a modern sap house.  They love what they’re doing from the mundane aspects to operating the high-tech equipment.  And their excitement is contagious!  I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the two evenings I spent learning from the Smiths.
    Starting in 1992 with about 30-40 maple trees using spiles and buckets, they now have about 10 acres of sugarbush (maple trees), tapping about 500 trees, hoping to add another 500 next year.  Initially, they used a hand-turned brace with a 7/16ths drill bit, pounded the spile into the tree, and hung a covered bucket.  Later, they tried a chainsaw with an attachment to do the drilling.  It worked well, but the saw was a bit heavy to lug around all day.  Now, they use a lightweight cordless drill with a smaller 5/16ths bit that is much easier to handle.  The smaller hole also causes less damage to the tree.  
    In 1999, they bought a filter press which does a better job than the prior hand filter to strain the processed syrup of undesirables.  Their new sap house, with running water, and hot water at that, is a major change from the original old woodshed.  They now have a kitchen area with a work table, sinks, counters and kitchen stove to process their syrup into candy and other sweet confections.  Stainless steel containers store the maple syrup before it’s packaged into bottles and made into other products.  They’ve added machines to make maple sugar candy, maple snow cones, maple cream (equipment built by their dad), maple cotton candy, and granulated maple sugar.  The Smith family is constantly upgrading, hoping in the next few years to add a bottling facility for a bigger and better kitchen processing area. 
    In 2012, they added a vacuum pump to the sapline which pulls sap off the trees for increased production. With plastic tubing strung between the trees, the pump draws the flowing sap downhill to the large stainless-steel bulk tank.  From there, it is siphoned into a large plastic tank on a trailer and hauled to their sap house.  Sure beats the days of handling all those buckets!  From this large tank, the sap is run up into an insulated stainless-steel storage tank that stands about 15 feet above ground next to the sap house. 
    From the elevated storage tank, sap is fed downline into the Piggy Back Unit in the sap house which sits above a 1 million BTU natural gas boiler pan.  The steam created from the lower pan heats the cold sap in the upper pan.  As the sap heats, water is boiled off the sap, condensing it down to the beginning stage of syrup.  Hot air is forced through the sap in the Piggy Back Unit with a high-pressure blower, helping bring the sap to boil.  Sap usually boils at 212 degrees like water, but that changes with atmospheric pressure.  At the time of my first visit, Sunday, March 10, 2013, based on the barometric pressure in the sap house, the sap boiled at 210.8 degrees.  As the sap continues to boil and water evaporates, the sap thickens.  Reaching about 7 degrees higher than standard boiling temperature, or about 219, the sap reaches syrup stage.  Thermometers in the pans are constantly monitored as they measure the temperatures.  It’s a very delicate process.

     
    As the boiled sap loses water content, it flows from the Piggy Back rearward pan into the front syrup pan directly over the fire.  Floats regulate the sap levels as sap is divided into channels to cook evenly.  If it were to cook too hot or too long at this stage, it would blacken and harden like concrete.  As it continues to cook, syrup is pulled from the front pan and drips down into a stainless-steel container.  The syrup in this container is then poured into the finishing pan over a smaller fire where it is slowly boiled and refined to become the sweet taste we know as pure maple syrup. 
    All this while steam from the boiling process emanates from the venting cupola above the building, permeating the outside air with the delicious aroma of sweet maple syrup.
    A daily log book is kept annually to record temps, weather (sunny, cloudy, windy, rainy, snowy), amount of sap collected and syrup made, the sugar content of the sap, barometric pressure, etc.  I asked about the average amount of sap collected daily, and Allan simply looked it up in his log.  Roughly 400-800 gallons are collected daily with a total last year (2012) of 4516 gallons of sap equaling about 70-80 gallons of syrup.  The high boiling temperatures kill any bacteria that might come along with the sap.  They also clean the equipment before each season starts, during the season on slow days with no sap to boil, and again at the end of the season.  It is still a labor-intensive venture.
    The weather patterns make a difference as to the amount of sap and its quality.  A good sap run begins after a cold winter with sufficient precipitation throughout the year.  With the dry summer of 2011, followed by a warmer-than-usual winter and no deep cold spell in January 2012, the production of sap was down, though “still pretty good,” and the Smiths were pleased.  Allan told me, “Every year’s production is different, and every night’s boiling is different.”  They have definitely seen seasonal ups and downs, as does every farmer, but cannot say they have seen an overall “global warming” pattern. 
    Usually they tap around Valentine’s Day, occasionally not until late February.  This year they tapped February 8th and had their first sap run on February 16th.   Sap collected in the raw state is about 2-3% sugar; the maple syrup stage is 66% sugar.  The lighter grades of syrup are made earlier in the season, with grades darkening as the season goes on.  The grades include Grade A light amber, most sweet; Grade A medium; Grade A dark with the most maple flavor; and Grade B dark, a cooking syrup.
    I asked about disasters, and they’ve had a few.  When boiling, the sap can quickly burn if the temperature goes up too high too fast.  What you’re left with is a pan of black goo that sets up like concrete, permanently ruining the evaporator pan.  I can sympathize as I once accidentally overcooked some sugar water for my hummingbirds.  Turning my back on the boiling sugar water for just a few minutes longer than expected, I returned to find it had become a thin layer of solid black concrete in a good pot.  I used a screwdriver to scrape hard and long, but got it all off.
    The Smith brothers faithfully attend the New York State Maple Producers’ Association every January, the largest convention in the U.S.  The two-day event, held at the Vernon/Verona/Sherril High School, brings in speakers and specialists from Vermont, Cornell University, and Canada, etc.  Highly educational, it is for anyone who taps from one tree to 10,000 trees.  The Smith brothers have been learning as much as they can about the business, including the latest technology available, constantly seeking to improve and grow their business.  They also learn about industry standards in order to meet government regulations so they can market their products commercially.
    Smith Family Maple Products are sold by word of mouth and at Family Farm Mercantile on Townline Road between Spencer and Van Etten.  A few years ago, a woman visiting from Ohio happened to see the Smith’s maple leaf sign on Sabin Road and stopped.  Now she faithfully orders maple syrup every year from her home in Ohio!  Eventually, they hope to build up a large enough volume to sell online.
    If folks want to try making syrup just for home consumption, there are no regulations.  Basically, Allen and Albert told me, “You need to boil the sap to 219 degrees, keep everything clean, without contamination, and enjoy!  Maple syrup is good on anything!”  There are many websites which can provide information, along with Cornell’s Cooperative Extension offices.    
    Being rather technologically challenged, I was very impressed with the Smith Family Maple Products’ operation.  From simple and humble beginnings, it has grown to encompass today’s modern technology in order to produce more syrup, more efficiently.
    Next week: Part II
  9. Linda Roorda
    We previously briefly touched on the importance of your ancestor’s Last Will and Testament, an excellent source of family documentation.  Wills are filed at surrogate court or county clerk’s office along with estate records for those who died intestate (without a will), inventories of estates, letters of administration, and guardianships, etc. 
    Some older wills may be found online at Sampubco Wills as posted by W. David Samuelson from whom you may purchase documents.  This site includes wills, guardianships, surrogate’s records/probate files, naturalizations, letters of administration, and cemetery listings.  Records are available for several states via alphabetical name search by county.  From my experience, mostly older wills are available, but not all of them.  I can, however, recommend this site as I purchased several ancestral wills more reasonably than from surrogate’s court or county clerk’s office.  However, it is still advisable to go to the appropriate office to search for and copy complete records, which I also did.
    One drawback can be old style writing and language.  Having begun my secretarial career in an Owego law firm, researching and copying old deeds and wills in shorthand, I was familiar with most of the standard language.  After transcribing eighteenth and nineteenth century ancestral wills I’d purchased, I submitted several online to respective county genweb sites.  They provide an opportunity for future researchers to use this gift, a way to pay back the gifts others have freely placed online to aid in research.  It’s all about helping each other on the journey.
    As for the old language of bequeathing one’s estate, I share excerpts in original format from the wills of a few of my ancestors – original spelling or misspelling retained. 
    Henrich/Henry Kniskern, signed 1780, probated 1784:  “In the Name of  God Amen. I, Henrich Knieskern at Shoharry [Schoharie] in the County of Albany [before Albany became several counties] farmer being at present weak in Body but of Sound Mind and Memory… considering that it is appointed for us all once to Die do this Eight Day of May in the Year of Our Lord Christ One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty make and Publish this my Last will and Testament in manner and form following that is to Say I recommend my Soul unto God that gave & my body unto the Earth from whence it came to be decently Interred… I give and bequeath unto my eldest Son… five Pounds Lawful money of New York (I Mean and Understand good hard Silver Money) for his birth Right… it is my will and Ordre that my Wife… shall have her supporting and Maintainment yearly and Every Year for her Life Time of my Estate in Knieskerns Dorph… [Kniskernsdorf is a now-extinct hamlet established on the Schoharie Creek by my ancestor, Johann Peter Kniskern, the Listmaster of one of the original 1710 Palatine settlements on the Hudson River.]  …I Give unto my Two Sons… together Equally my farming utenciels and Tools as both or Two Waggons & Two Sleeds Ploughs and Harrows with all the Tackling and furniture thereof… axes hoes & other Implements of husbandry… I Give to my Two Daughters, as bed Goods, Pewter Goods, Iron pots, Cooper goods & other goods… I give to my Two Sons… Equally my Loom and all & Every articles that belongs to Weavers…”
    Adam Dingman, a prosperous freeholder of Kinderhook and Albany, wrote “...know all men that in the year seventeen hundred and twenty and twenty-one, the twenty-first day of January, in the seventh year of the reign of our sovereign lord, King George, I, Adam Dingeman, born at Haerlem, Holland, sick and weak of body, but having the perfect use of my senses…”  Unfortunately, he did not name his children from whom I have proven descendancy.
    George Hutton, son of Lt. Timothy Hutton, listed all children, with daughters by their married names, a very helpful will.  An interesting inventory with values was attached to his wife Elizabeth’s will from 1845.  Numerous items were listed, including “1 feather bed $7.25, 1 blue and white spread $4.00, 1 straw bed tick $.25, 1 brown calico dress $.37, 1 black cashmere shall $.75, 1 pr morocco shoes $.50, 1 rocking chair $1.00.”
    Other wills bequeath hereditaments (one of my favorite words), i.e. land, crops, tools, animals.  A McNeill family will “allows” an unmarried sister to use half of the house for life.  And an inventory made in 1758 for the estate of John McNeill, an apparently wealthy mariner (father of John C. McNeill), includes “1 Jacket of Cut Vellvet & 1 pair of Black Vallvet Britches, 1 paire of Lether Buckskin Britches, 1 Great Coat of Davinshire Carsey, 1 fine linnin Sheet x3 coarse ones, 1 45 weight of fetther, 1 paire of carved Shew buckells & knee buckells of silver, 1 paire Sleve buttons of gold, 2 Small Bibells w/one Silver clasped, 1 book called fishers Arithmitick, 1 seet of Harrow teeth, 1 Seet of plow Irons.” 
    Old documents do make fascinating reads! 
    COMING NEXT:  Genealogy Websites
  10. Linda Roorda

    The Empty Chair

    By Linda Roorda,

    I am so thankful for family and friends who were able to attend my mother’s graveside memorial service yesterday. I had selected a pastor for the service; but, as it turned out, he was not feeling well enough to attend. Yet in God’s wisdom and plan, the funeral director asked me to give Mom’s eulogy since I knew her best. And though I forgot some important parts I’d wanted to share, it became a much more memorable and special service to me, and to all who attended from comments shared.
    So, I’d like to share a poem and reflection written several years ago which I closed with yesterday, but which is fitting for each one of us with losses of family and friends. For us since the end of May, it’s been the loss of several close friends, a sister-in-law, several cousins, and now my mother. For losses you have suffered, may you feel God’s comforting presence with peace in your heart… for the love you once shared will live on forever in your heart and in treasured memories.
    It seems that at every holiday and family event there’s an empty chair.  We all have one... or more.  It’s where our special loved one(s) always sat.  Actually, we can still visualize them sitting there, sharing our love and laughter.  But, it’s all just a memory now... sometimes hazier than we’d like.
    Memories are good from this perspective, even if tinged with a bit of sadness.  There are memories of fun and happy times... of laughter at the world’s best jokes told only the way they could… and countless days of childhood fun – before technology spoiled the best in our games of imagination.  Memories of when our children were infants… as we moms nursed our precious babies, rocking them to sleep…  And yes, memories of tears shed… as dads cuddled their little one crying from hurts - physical or emotional.  If only that old rocker in the corner could talk… all the stories it would share!
    It also seems that many of our memories of days long ago are laced with the beauty and simplicity we now miss in the busy rush of life.  So, sit quietly in the empty chair, and take time to think about all that once was when our special loved one was here among us… and remember their beautiful life. 
    The Empty Chair
    Linda A. Roorda 
    The empty chair that quietly waits
    Once held a life in arms of love
    A life of joy and busy fun
    But now stands mute in days of silence.

    The one who sat upon its wood
    Once held a wee and precious babe
    To gently rock away the tears
    And soothe aside the anxious fears.

    The empty chair has heard it all
    From shaking sobs to rolling laughs
    And then it listened once again
    To all the stories read aloud.

    The empty chair in silent years
    Will keep its secrets evermore
    Of dreams and hopes and plans and sighs
    Of each who sat upon its lap.

    The empty chair has heard the pleas
    In earnest prayers of burdened hearts
    Like gentle sighs to God above
    For Him to guide those it once held.

    The empty chair now brings to mind
    The love of those who graced our lives
    Who’ve left behind sweet memories
    Tenderly held forever in love.
    ~~
    08/19/13
     
  11. Linda Roorda
    Cemetery records are another invaluable resource for your ancestry research.  Historical societies also retain cemetery records, or transcriptions, of virtually all old gravestones for every cemetery, large or small, within any given county.  Unfortunately, I have typically found this work to have been done several decades ago (often from early to mid-20th century), and desperately in need of updating.  However, with our modern technology, a great resource not available when I first began my research journey in the late 1990s is the Find-A-Grave website. 
    Cemetery associations maintain each cemetery, retaining records for all burials.  They can often provide more information from their records on the deceased than that which is on a headstone, including full dates of birth and death, and family relationships with parents’ names and/or name of the spouse.  On the other hand, I’ve also seen where my trip to a specific cemetery gave me more data on a gravestone than was written in the historical society’s record.  
    It is also well worth making a trip to the actual cemetery whenever possible.  On one trip, I walked up and down virtually every row of a very old, but still used, cemetery north of Cobleskill.  Frustrated at not finding specific ancestors, I decided to give it one last try and got out of the car, facing a short steep slope.  Climbing to the top of the little knoll, I walked directly into an unusual circular plot.  Peering closely at the stones, I had that “aha” moment – I’d found exactly what I was looking for!  For there were my mother’s grandparents and great-grandparents!  As a teen, my Mom would drive her mother to this spot to place flowers on family graves, but she was unable to recall exactly where to find the plot.
    While researching, it is helpful to know that a.e. (i.e. anno aetatis suae) on a gravestone is Latin for in the__  year of life versus age meaning year of age.  For example, you may see a stone with a date of death and age as follows:  Jan 10, 1834, a.e. 16y.  This indicates the deceased was in the 16th year of life; but, in reality, was 15 years old on the previous birthday before death.  You may also see the deceased’s date of death with age as follows:  d. June 15, 1827, 10y 3m 5d.  From this date, you can count backwards to the date of birth, i.e. b. March 10, 1817.  Take photos of gravestones for documentation, along with proof of the location of the stone(s) and exact cemetery of burial.
    In the case of very old stones from the 1700s and 1800s, I have done rubbings - either with washable chalk to make the eroding chiseled letters stand out, or by pencil rubbing on paper lain atop the sunken lettering when nothing else was available.  The latter gave me data on my ancestor, John Caldwell McNeill, that was not in the cemetery records.  I knew he was a sergeant in the New Hampshire Line, serving at Bunker Hill as per his pension file; but, a separate gravestone revealed these barely discernable words etched in stone by doing a pencil rubbing on paper:  “Corp.1, Co.1, N.Y. Regt. Rev War.”  Questioning what he was doing in a New York regiment, I spent the money to purchase his full  Revolutionary War pension application file. 
    I then read historical books about the Revolutionary War for their collateral documentation of the era.  Reading “The Spirit of Seventy-Six,” author Morris Commager confirmed that the New Hampshire unit was asked to join the above-noted New York regiment on a mission to Canada.  Records researched by Commager detailed how the men were captured, stripped of all clothes and possessions, and imprisoned on an island in the St. Lawrence with many soldiers dying.  The remaining soldiers were bought back in a cartel by Benedict Arnold and released to serve out their enlistment, confirmed by other reputable sources, including “Benedict Arnold’s Navy” by James L. Nelson – a really great read!  This all substantiated affidavits in John C.’s pension file and the story in a New Hampshire county historical book about the capture and release as celebrated annually by John C.’s friends and relatives who remained in Londonderry, NH after the Revolutionary War when he removed to Carlisle, Schoharie County, NY. 
    Although rare, cemetery records and gravestones do occasionally contain conflicting dates or errors.  A death certificate, if available, would be the more accurate record, along with collateral records.
    I have personally seen few errors in gravestone data, but one stands out as part of my documented and published research thesis.  My ancestor, Lt. Timothy Hutton (b. 1746) had a nephew Lt. Timothy Hutton (b. 1764), both serving in military units in New York.  A monument to my Lt. Timothy Hutton at Carlisle Rural Cemetery in Carlisle, Schoharie Co., NY credits his service under Capt. Gross of Willett’s Regiment in the Revolutionary War. 
    On checking roster records, two Lt. Timothy Huttons are listed in Col. Marinus Willett’s Regiment at the same time – one in Capt. Gross’s company, the other in Capt. Livingston’s.  Purchasing military records of my ancestor, with my editor supplying a copy of affidavits for the younger Hutton, provides our proof.  This documentation notes both Lt. Timothy Huttons served in Willett’s NY Regiment.  But, Lt. Hutton b. 1764 stated in affidavits he served under Capt. Gross, with other documentation noting he died in New Jersey, while his uncle, my ancestor, Lt. Hutton b. 1746, though not stating which captain he served under, is thus presumed to have served under Capt. Livingston as per the unit’s roster records.  My Timothy Hutton (b. 1764) was documented serving in Schoharie County, NY, settling and dying in Carlisle, my mother’s home town.  And so, I proved my Lt. Timothy Hutton did not serve under Capt. Gross as per his cemetery monument, but rather his nephew of the same name did.  With both men sharing the same name, it's no wonder the kind folks who put up his monument were confused!  
    There has also been a concerted effort over the last several years to put cemetery records online, a great aid in research, but you should still document and prove data accuracy because, again, I have seen errors.  As the years pass, more and more data is making its way online than was available before 2000 when I began my research.  Again, check out the Find-A-Grave website.  Through the kindness of many people, photos are taken of gravestones, and, along with data written on the monuments, are placed online.
    Obviously, not every grave is to be found, nor is all information and family data accurate as I recently discovered from someone’s erroneous tie to my paternal family which I personally knew to be absolutely false.  I emailed the contact person and did not receive a reply back; I don’t know if it was ever corrected online as I’ve not gone back.  But, admittedly, it is very rewarding to find a photo of just the grave you’ve been searching for!
    COMING NEXT:  Census Records.
  12. Linda Roorda

    Sometimes...

    By Linda Roorda,

    Knowing someone we love is facing the journey to her heavenly home soon, and thinking of those who have recently lost their loved ones, I wanted to share this poem and reflective thoughts today. 
    Sometimes… the pain that life hands out is just too much to bear.  You’ve lost a dear loved one, perhaps a beloved pet, or an awesome job which was an extension of yourself, maybe you live with chronic illness, or perhaps an incurable disease…
    And in those difficult times, isn’t it a wonderful feeling to have someone who truly cares come alongside you… someone willing to listen to your heart, to help ease the grief, to share your tears, to speak a few words of wisdom, to help you deal with a particular hurdle, or just to be there to hold your hand while sitting quietly with you?
    This poem was written several years ago as we continued to face my husband’s chronic illnesses.  It all began in the fall of 2008 with statin drug muscle damage and rhabdomyolysis (excretion of blood from muscles), polymyalgia rheumatica, and constant dizziness - with numerous diagnoses (comorbidities) added to the list since then with multiple hospitalizations, and near-death situations too many times.  This is a new way of life for both of us... certainly not the life we dreamed of when we got married.
    Gone are the easier and somewhat carefree days.  Gone is the freedom for Ed do what he enjoyed doing, like stacking his own firewood, being able to take care of our yard and other household chores with ease, or going for evening walks up the road… all the things we used to take for granted. 
     No longer are we able to travel as a couple beyond doctor appointments, or enjoy an evening out to dinner.  We enjoyed going to Cooperstown, New York for our 20th anniversary and later with our kids – to the Baseball Hall of Fame and The Farmers’ Museum.  We’d hoped to take a dinner cruise on the Erie Canal some day.  We long to just get in the car and go visit our children and their families; but, sitting in the car, even for doctor appointments, takes a toll on Ed with increased pain, stiffness, and a generalized sick feeling. So much of what the rest of us can do and take for granted takes great effort on his part due to various limitations.
    Yet, we both know very well we are not alone in this journey.  You, too, are likely facing your own difficult struggles… and our hearts and prayers go out to each and every one of you.  For God never promised that this journey called life would be easy just because we put our faith in Him… and may we know He is still in control no matter the circumstances. 
    A few verses come to mind that we cling to during the hard days and which give us a sense of peace (all Scripture from the New International Version):
    1)      “But he said to me [the Apostle Paul], ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”  Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”  2 Corinthians 12:9
    2)      “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him…”  Romans 8:28
    3)      “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God.  I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”  Isaiah 41:10
    4)      For “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace.  In this world you will have trouble.  But take heart!  I have overcome the world.”  John 16.33
    In your most difficult times, may you feel the comforting presence of loved ones helping to ease your pain, just as you feel the presence of our Lord wrapping His arms around you in love… as He covers each one of us with His peace amidst the turmoil…  
    Sometimes…
    Linda A. Roorda
     Sometimes…
    The hurt just cuts too deep
    As you watch your loved one
    Face endless days of pain.
     Sometimes…
    You feel abandoned
    When prayers seem unanswered
    As waves of despair set in.
    Sometimes…
    You stand alone along the side
    Holding their hand in love
    Helpless to assuage the hurt.
     Sometimes…
    Tears that flow from out the soul
    Tenderly touch the heart
    When words cannot even convey.
     Sometimes…
    A hand that reaches out
    To hold, to steady, to calm
    Brings precious comfort to the weary.
     Sometimes…
    The voice of wisdom
    Gently whispers in your ear
    As the love of God gently enfolds.
     Sometimes…
    To understand the trial
    Is simply to accept
    God’s hand is still in control.
    ~~  09/09/15 ~~
  13. Linda Roorda

    The Mentor

    By Linda Roorda,

    Today, my thoughts turn back to thank God for the mentors in my life… and I’m sure you can think of those who’ve blessed your life with encouragements along your journey.  I’d love to hear your stories of how others gave encouraging words as you grew up, or even those who came alongside you as an adult with a helpful perspective.  As you remember those who cheered you on, become a mentor to someone who could use your encouraging words.  (I’ve included the URL below my poem for the podcast, "Balms for the Soul", where my friend, Carla, has included my blogs - if you’d like to listen.)
    What do teachers Josephine Rice of East Palmyra, NY, Clara Breeman of Clifton, NJ and Kathy Haire of Owego, NY have in common? 
    We’ve all been blessed with a mentor, and likely more than one.  They come alongside to encourage us, help us understand a difficult concept, and help to guide us in the right direction.  They have an innate ability to bring out the best in us… that hidden talent or gift we didn’t even know existed. 
    I’ve had my share of mentors beginning with an elementary teacher for 1st through 3rd grades, Josephine Rice.  A self-taught teacher at East Palmyra, NY’s Christian School, she was gifted.  And she knew how to bring out the best in her students!  I’ve always remembered her teaching skills, and ability to teach three grades of about 30+ students in the same room of a small private school.  Though I distinctly remember dreading her timed math tests as she held a stopwatch in her hand, I learned a lot under her!  She also taught the finer points of phonics, and I enjoyed the old “Dick and Jane” book series when learning to read. 
    Having learned to read phonetically with certain sight recognition words, that skill continued to be a life-long benefit, particularly in my medical transcription profession when confronting unfamiliar new words.  But, it was also the foundation used to help my oldest daughter, Jenn, when she struggled learning to read.  I made flashcards for her, just as I used in Mrs. Rice’s class.  Math was also taught by rote memorization, which paid off in foundational skills retained, though math has not been my strong point.
    My next mentor was my seventh-grade English teacher, Clara Breeman, at Christopher Columbus Junior High in Clifton, NJ.  A woman with the 1960s beehive hairdo, she was mocked for appearing to be quite elderly.  She was considered by my peers to be harsh and exacting, taking no guff from anyone, the last teacher you ever wanted to have.  And, I’ll never forget my fear when I learned I had her for both homeroom and English – a dreaded combination, according to the neighborhood kids.  But, I graduated high school knowing she had been one of the best! 
    From Miss Breeman, I learned life-long foundational skills for writing, which I taught to my children when they began writing essays.  I learned to love sentence diagraming, and excelled under her tutelage.  But, I also felt her love when a young man, sitting next to me, began to taunt and mock me with his well-known sarcastic tongue.  Miss Breeman let him know in no uncertain terms that that was unacceptable behavior and would not be tolerated.  She insisted he apologize, and then moved him to another seat.  A Christian woman in a public-school setting, she had no qualms about promoting the use of the biblical book of Psalms for its poetry, from which I and others did our book reports.
    Years later, Kathy Haire, my gym teacher as a senior in Owego Free Academy, was a mentor who used praise for her “Ladies” which brought out her students’ best.  Gifted in athletic ability, I never utilized my full potential.  At Passaic Christian School when I lived in Clifton, NJ, I had excelled in double-Dutch jump rope, basketball and tetherball, with a natural high jump to block and defeat my opponents, much to my shorter 6th grade boyfriend’s chagrin. 
    Back at Clifton, NJ’s Christopher Columbus Jr. High, I had been among the fastest runners in my class, jumping hurdles with ease and room to spare on the stadium track in gym, and played a great basketball game.  Later, gym class in Owego, NY showed skill in volleyball, serving a strong ball to the guys’ team, with a springing high jump to hit and spike that ball back down over the net to score.  Then as a senior, with praise from Kathy Haire, I again played great basketball in gym, and perfected a routine on the uneven bars in gymnastics despite my initial petrifying fear of those bars!  She believed in me and gave me confidence to succeed.  I now look back at all the years missed when I could have joined track and field, tennis, volleyball or basketball teams - and the ranks of my Tillapaugh relatives with their athletic abilities and college and state records.
    Additional mentors include John and Betty LaGeorge and Pastor Doug and Lori Brock.  Their loving friendship blessed us, though they’ve moved on from the community.  Coming alongside us as a family, they included our children in babysitting and extra activities involving church and the Christian school, and simply shared God’s love and wisdom with us as a family.
    And isn’t that what our God simply asks of us… that we bless others through the gifts and talents He’s blessed us with?  Mentors model and teach wisdom, showing us a better way, perhaps a way we never thought attainable.  Mentors live out their love for others, and shower those around them with evidence of their faith in action.  May we go and do the same. 
    The Mentor
    Linda A. Roorda
    Your kind loving words enveloped my heart
    And brought out the best hidden within.
    You found the key to unlock the source
    Releasing the gifts that I never knew.
    ~
    You let me fly on wings that were new
    Discovering self with talents and skills.
    Confidence builder, you who encouraged,
    Tapped into assets just waiting to bloom.
    ~
    For like a flower about to blossom
    Absorbing kind words which nourish like rain,
    So discerning hearts that desire the best,
    Treasure the wealth emerging like dawn.
    ~
    Your gentle praise and guiding wisdom
    Opened the doors to a world unknown.
    You led the way as practice perfected
    That which had worth from talent unadorned.
    ~
    Like silver and gold refined by furnace
    Is elegance true, a beauty within.
    Always the mentor seeks out the hidden
    And brings out the glow with encouraging love.
    ~~
    To listen to this blog on Podcast:  https://open.spotify.com/show/7Big193iLjkZ5kAus2h4lU
  14. Linda Roorda
    There are many free genealogy websites which are a great resource for records and helpful family data, including RootsWeb.  This free site, part of the ancestry.com family, includes a RootsWeb Family History Wiki section with their guide to searching your family trees. Along with Hosted Web Sites, you will find great tips and websites on how to begin searching, a list of sources and where to find various records, and a list of various countries/ethnic groups.  Clicking on any of their hi-lited items will provide information on beginning your research. 
    The RootsWeb page has been updated since I first used it 20 years ago, taken down the past few years while it was under re-construction.  Feel free to check them out for their usable functions, like the Message Boards.  Sadly, I think it's not as comprehensive as it once was.
    You can search surname listings under RootsWeb's “Connect to Family Trees” section to see what might be out there, though this page does not appear to be complete in its listings.  But, entering a name in the search tab might garner some valuable family information for you.  My favorite section years ago was the “U.S. Town/County Database.”  Here, I have found a wealth of information for vital records from churches and cemeteries, biographies, family lineages, and more.  Researching my Mom’s early New York families often brought me to the New Amsterdam/New York City, and the Albany, Schenectady and Schoharie county genweb sites. 
    Under the section labeled “Message Boards,” you can search your surname of interest, read other posts, and post your own query for information which I have done.  Folks on these message boards have been very helpful.  This has also been a resource to meet extended relatives in various lines, which I have also done.  We shared our own research and documented data with each other.  Several friendships were made this way, and they continue to be counted among my close friends today.
    I did find errors in submitted family trees on RootsWeb (or other online family websites) when I began my ancestry search, prompting my own research to document, write and publish my family articles in the highly recommended and accurate New York Genealogical and Biographical Journal.  For that reason, I tend to stay away from submitted family trees when seeking information on my ancestors, though you can certainly get answers to questions here.  I prefer to do as much footwork as I can on my own, albeit with guidance from friends who taught me as I learned along the way.  Submitted trees certainly can be entirely accurate; however, if used as a starting point with other online records, you can then seek sources to provide solid documentation and corroborative proof, i.e. church and cemetery records in reputable books or journals, census records, wills, etc.
    The next section is “Mailing Lists.”  These lists were also invaluable to me years ago, but it is no longer usable as noted on the updated website.  I was formerly on an email list which provided discussions on various topics relating to the early settlers and records of the 1600s and 1700s in New Netherlands/New York. It was a rewarding experience to reply to someone’s query by contributing data I have in a book of ancient Albany’s city and county records that was helpful to others. 
    From RootsWeb, I subscribed years ago to the Schoharie County email list.  That resource was where I saw the notice by a professor from Long Island who found an old photo in a Washington, D.C. antique shop.  The pencil writing on the back of the matting read, “First Tillapaugh Reunion July 1910…”  I replied that my mother’s two oldest brothers inherited that farm, and their sons continue to farm it today. A reproduction of the photo is in the Dallenbach book of descendants which I own, so I was well aware of what the professor had found.  In fact, the house in the photo, built in the 1830s, is still very much in use today.  I was offered the opportunity to purchase the photo which, of course, I did, thus beginning my genealogy research in earnest in the late 1990s.
    Other sections like “Quick Links” have important site listings including Find-A-Grave.  These options may include national and international websites, other tools and resources such as blank forms and charts, and hosted volunteer projects.  The latter includes books owned by folks who are willing to research them for information you might need from a particular book.  Your search may also find volunteers who are able to do local lookups at either cemeteries or historical societies for you.  When volunteers have helped by doing research footwork for me, I felt it appropriate to pay their expenses, a much-appreciated gift. 
    You can also submit your FamilyTreeMaker data to RootsWeb.  Instead, of doing that, I submitted a McNeill descendancy outline I wrote up with names and dates of birth to the Schoharie County Genweb site where it would be more likely to be of value for descendants.  It is also common courtesy not to submit names of any living relatives, or those born within the past 100 years out of respect for privacy.  I included no one born from 1900 through the 20th century.
    Another free online source of cross-referenced data is the comprehensive site called CyndisList.  The Categories section provides a list of resources, including American state and government as well as international resources.  There is an Adoption section to help find orphans and living people, message boards, and volunteers to assist your search.  A section entitled Free Stuff includes charts and forms, translation tools, online databases to search, volunteer lookups, surname family associations and newsletters, etc. 
    Sections you might not have thought about are included at CyndisList:  1) Migration Routes, Roads and Trails, 2) Canals, Rivers and Waterways, and 3) Immigration and Naturalization.  There are sections entitled Heraldry, Hit a Brick Wall?, and Ships & Passenger Lists.  The Mailing Lists are great for asking questions when you’re stumped, and for connecting with researchers working on the same lines.  There are also sites to purchase items, and free trials to search various genealogy websites before paying their site subscription fee.
    Ancestry.com has some free data, like the 1880 Federal Census records, but the best records are obtained using subscription-based entrance.  Here, you will find tabs for Home, Trees, Search, DNA, Help, and Extras.  It is an invaluable resource.
    Perhaps your ancestors came through Ellis Island.  Search The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation to find your ancestors and the ship on which they sailed.  A ship’s manifest lists the passengers, their age, name of the ship, port, date of departure, occupation, nearest relative in their country of origin, and their sponsor in the U.S.  I found information for my husband’s paternal grandfather’s family when they emigrated from Holland in the early 1920s.  Some went first to North Dakota before settling in northern New Jersey as dairy farmers while others settled right away in northern New Jersey and Massachusetts to work in the textile mills. 
    I also found records at the Ellis Island website for my father’s families which emigrated from the Netherlands.  Like many families, both of my father’s grandfathers came through Ellis Island, each with their oldest son – my dad’s paternal grandfather in November 1922, and his maternal grandfather in September 1923.  They settled in and around Kalamazoo, Michigan among other Dutch.  When they earned enough money, they sent for the rest of their family.  My paternal grandfather emigrated from Uithuizermeeden in the province of Groningen at age 15 on July 1923 with his mother and siblings through Ellis Island. 
    However, my dad’s maternal grandfather was determined his wife and children would not go through the rigors of steerage and Ellis Island.  Instead, he sent money back home to them in Rotterdam for second-class tickets.  Decades ago, my grandmother told me only a little about their sailing on the S. S. Rotterdam to Hoboken, New Jersey.  Research showed the ship came into a New York City port in January 1926, with the ship’s manifest listing my grandmother’s family.  Unfortunately, I didn’t ask more questions.  She told me that a Dutchman, who made a living helping immigrants, met my great-grandmother and her children (my grandmother was age 15), and took them to his home in Hoboken, New Jersey.  He fed them, put them up overnight, and the next morning put them on the right train to Michigan with lunches in hand.  There, my great-grandmother was reunited with her husband, and my grandmother and her siblings with their father and oldest brother.  How exciting that must have been!
    My grandparents married in 1931 and lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  With the Great Depression, my grandfather and his father lost everything as building contractors.  They removed to another Dutch enclave in Clifton, New Jersey where my grandfather became a door-to-door salesman before later becoming a successful general contractor, with many a beautiful house or remodeling project to his credit.
    You can purchase quality photo documentation of the ships your ancestors sailed on.  However, I simply printed the free online photo of the ships on which my ancestors sailed, along with each respective ship’s manifest for documentation.  I used both Ancestry.com and the Ellis Island websites to obtain records.
    For steerage immigrants, the Ellis Island experience included passing a medical and legal inspection.  If your papers were in order, and you were in reasonably good health, the inspection process typically lasted 3-5 hours.  The ship’s manifest log was used by inspectors to cross-examine each immigrant during the primary inspection.  Though Ellis Island has been called the “Island of Tears,” the vast majority of immigrants were treated respectfully and allowed to enter America to begin their new life.  However, about two percent of immigrants were denied entry.  Typically, if you were suspected of having a contagious illness, or if the inspector thought you might become a public burden, entrance to the U.S. was denied.  I can only imagine the pain it must have caused when one or more family members were told they had to go back to their native country. 
    I am very appreciative of the efforts my many ancestors made to emigrate from their home country, to which none ever returned, of becoming American citizens, and of their hard work to provide a better way of life for their family.  By sharing bits of my ancestral heritage, of who they were and whence they came, I hope it has encouraged you to search for your ancestors, to find their place in the building of our great America, and thus to know the gift of your family heritage.
    FINAL COLUMN NEXT:  Genealogy Website Resource List
  15. Linda Roorda

    I'm Only One

    By Linda Roorda,

    There are so many people, past and present, who have made a difference for others by simply being who they were intended to be… each an individual who stands out in the crowd in their own way… and who have made a difference in my life and your life.  I once took a photo of a single stalk of corn growing in a field of soybeans across the road from us and posted it to Facebook.  It spoke silent volumes of being the one alone, not afraid to stand out and be different. (Since I can't find it, I shared this unique photo of field grass.)
    We have gifts, unique to each of us, enabling us to reach out to be there for others in as many different ways as there are people.  And it’s what we do, or don’t do, with our gifts that makes a difference in this world.  For, as the venerable Ben Franklin once wrote, "He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else."
    When our son was in Boy Scouts of America Troop #17, he learned the association’s motto has always been: “Do a good turn daily.”  And I recall Dan sitting for his Eagle Scout “inquisition,” quizzed about all he’d learned and accomplished over the past several years of badge work, camping, and camaraderie with friends.  The gentleman from Binghamton had a strong bold character while Dan has a quiet, easygoing, humble personality like his Dad.  On being asked what he’d done that day as his good deed, my son was speechless.  He had no idea what “good deed” he might have done. When they took a break, I shared with Dan that he naturally helped others out of the kindness of his heart, consistently every day and often without being asked, just like his Dad.  But I also told him he had helped me that morning without my having to ask him to help with certain household chores.  He doesn’t have to go looking for a good deed.  It’s a gift that comes natural to Dan, without hesitation, and something he continued through college, carried forward in his employment, and still does freely for his wife and children, and others.  Anyone blessed to know Dan knows his gentle loving heart.
    What a great motto - teaching young boys to do a good deed every day by serving others without hesitation!  As the Bible puts it, we should “do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than [ourselves].  Each of [us] should look not only to [our] own interests, but also to the interests of others.” (Philippians 2:3-447)
    And in all of this, I am also reminded of what God said to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.” (Jeremiah 1:5) We certainly may not be called to be a prophet like Jeremiah, but the Lord has set each of us apart, given each of us special gifts, unique to who we are meant to be.
    Reminds me of reaching out to others in a welcoming manner whether working as a medical/radiology transcriptionist before retiring or now as a teacher/TA sub in our local schools.  It’s a chance to give back… a time to assist others in understanding… a time to smile and encourage… a time to give praise for a job well done… a time to listen when someone needs an ear to hear where they’re at… a time to simply be there when they need someone on their side… like others have done for me.
    Individually, we may be only one, and we may feel insignificant at that, but we can accomplish so much for those around us… to meet their needs, to put a smile on their face, and joy in their heart.  Be that one! 
    I'm Only One
    Linda A. Roorda 
    I'm only one, but a difference I make
    By touch of hand or the sound of voice
    Soothing the anxious, fearful and hopeless
    Blessing with peace the heart in distress.
     
    I’m only one, but a smile I bring
    A ray of sun to brighten your day
    A sprig of hope that glows eternal
    To cheer you on when all else seems lost.
     
    I'm only one, but humbly I seek
    To amend the wrong I've offended you by
    Forgiveness I ask from your heart to mine
    With grace and mercy to heal the rift caused.
     
    I'm only one, but peace I offer
    With arms that welcome to embrace your heart
    To show I care no matter the pain
    For only with love do we reflect grace.
     
    I'm only one, but courage I ask
    To tackle issues that trouble our days
    Seeking answers to life's woundings deep
    That healing may come to scars of our soul.
     
    I'm only one, but beauty I desire
    Not outward surface but heart's inner glow
    The balm of solace, depth of contentment
    Glitter of joy, and the calm of peace.
     
    I'm only one, but change I effect
    Bringing comfort to the hurting souls
    Sharing laughter, burdens to lighten
    With hands tightly clasped to feel love’s cadence.
     
    I’m only one, but wisdom I crave
    To humbly walk with You as my guide
    Sharing Your truth to brighten the path
    That leads us to Your embracing love.
    ~~
    06/08-11/16
     
  16. Linda Roorda
    Maybe we don’t say it enough… those little words that mean so much - “You made a difference…” or “I appreciate you…” or “I love you!”  Along with the words, there are ways we can show how much we care, and here are a few I’ve been pondering. 
    Since retiring, I have totally enjoyed a second “career” - subbing in our public school district, and noticed something right away that has been consistent… the welcoming words and smiles from staff on up to the principals and superintendent – words of appreciation and thanks for coming in and helping out, for being there for the kids, no matter their age, from pre-K thru high school.  And it got me to thinking about us as family and friends.  I appreciate each of you for who you are, for your being a very special part of my life, for your kind loving words, for words of wisdom and words that teach me… Thank you! You’ve made a difference in my life! And I love you! 
    In thinking about others, one of the best ways we can express how much we care is by simply serving them, expecting nothing in return.  As the Apostle Paul wrote, “Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others.” (Philippians 2:4)  Ask how they’re doing, and truly listen when they express life is not going so well.  Make the effort to really understand what someone else might be feeling, or what they might be going through.
    Volunteer your time, that often rare commodity in our hectic schedules.  We can help those in a difficult situation, or recovering from surgery or illness.  We can provide a meal, or simply give attention to a shut-in to let them know they’ve not been forgotten.  Perhaps we could volunteer in a program where serving will benefit many… such as the local fire department, ambulance squad, an emergency department, or a local food cupboard.  There are so many ways we can share our time to show how much we care.
    Be a mentor to others.  Encourage them in their endeavors.  Help them succeed.  Lift them up emotionally.  Listen to their concerns.  Cheer them on!  Perhaps helping to widen their horizon in a favorite hobby might lead them into a fulfilling life-time career.
    Be there for the grieving.  Many words aren’t necessary.  Simple silence with a hug in sitting with them brings comfort.  Listen to their heart as they express their sorrow.  Share their pain.  Show you care.
    Give a smile to those you meet along your daily path, even strangers!  Watch their face light up knowing that you care enough to share a simple smile to brighten their day! 
    Be joyful for each other!  Praise them for even their smallest accomplishments, and express how happy you are for them in their greater successes. 
    Let someone know you'll pray for them.  Make someone a gift using your special talents, or gift them something unique to their interests.
    Greet others with a genuine friendly tone.  Share a positive attitude.  Make others feel wanted and welcomed.  Let them know how much you appreciate them and all that they do.
    With the passing of a friend’s daughter this past week, the age of my children, who shared my March birthday, I shed tears of sadness for her family in their deepest loss.  She had become a dedicated funeral director, comforting those who grieved their loved ones.  She moved on to a new job, showing those in need, and those she took care of in group homes, the depths of love from her heart.  Loved by family and friends, she made a difference in the lives of others. 
    I also learned this week that a friend, a distant cousin found when I was seeking to fill in my Mom’s ancestry, is in serious condition in ICU.  And my heart breaks for her and her family, as we pray for her recovery.  Treasured like a sister, we bonded right away, learning we had so much in common when we first met online.  We shared family ancestry data that we had gathered, as I learned much from her.  A former nurse, she next found fulfillment as a teacher’s aide, assisting special needs children.  In so many ways, she makes a difference in the lives of those with whom she comes in contact from her own caring and generous loving heart.
    Last month, I shared some of our daughter Jenn’s writings for a college psych course, as a memorial to who she was.  Passing away too young at 25 in 2003, she had much to look forward to, but God knew her days before even one of them came to be… and she made a difference in the lives of everyone around her with gentleness, wisdom, and a kind and caring heart of love.
    And I know that you, too, can name many examples of how others made a difference in the world around them, even in your life… just as you share this same loving kindness to make a difference in someone else’s life… someone in need of your compassion, comfort, kindness and generosity.  Feel free to share your thoughts with us all below.
    We can each make a difference wherever we are in whatever we do!  Shining our inner light as a reflection of Christ’s love within us, we let others know how much we care about them.  Be the one who makes a difference in the world today!
    You Made A Difference…
    Linda A. Roorda
     You made a difference in the world today…
    You gave a smile to someone in need
    Your face truly showed you cared from the heart
    For your love was felt wrapped up in the glow.
     
    You made a difference in the world today…
    You lent an ear to someone hurting
    You listened to tears and heard their story
    You held their heart in the depths of your soul.
     
    You made a difference in the world today…
    You walked the path where a friend was plodding
    You carried their burden, you went the extra mile,
    You eased their stress and brought hope to their day.
     
    You made a difference in the world today…
    Your hands rough and worn, were held out with warmth
    Bestowing attention, you covered their needs
    As your arms enveloped to guard and protect.
     
    You made a difference in the world today…
    You spoke words of truth with gentle kindness
    You showed concern, asking how they were
    And shared their dreams scattered in the storm.
     
    You made a difference in the world today…
    You took the time to sit in silence
    You held their hand bringing peace and comfort
    When their life was torn apart in sorrow.
     
    You made a difference in the world today…
    You shared their joy with laughter’s ring
    You praised them for a job well done
    As your love and hugs showed the depth of care.
    ~~
    03/14/21 – 03/19/21
  17. Linda Roorda
    As summer’s warmth gives way to the cooler days of fall, our thoughts turn to cold-weather projects, and that of storing food for the coming winter.  Without that process, our ancestors would be hard pressed to get through the bitter cold months, unless, of course, you could afford to purchase all your food supplies at the local general store. 
    Once upon a time, most families cultivated large vegetable gardens and raised a barnyard menagerie to put food by for the coming winter – a vital necessity.  How they accomplished it without our modern water-bath and pressure canners, and freezers, that we and our mother’s generation have used amazes me. 
    In early 2003, I was concluding my empty-nest project, researching and writing an extensive manuscript which documented every family line of my mother’s parents back to the early 17th century settlers of New Netherlands.  And that was using only the pathetically slow dial-up internet for online research!  In asking for input from relatives on their memories of our grandparents, my aunt, Shirley (Tillapaugh) Van Duesen, shared how much she enjoyed working alongside her dad.  Her ties to her father don’t surprise me.  While growing up, I enjoyed time spent working with my dad, too, and that naturally evolved into enjoying time spent working with my husband on the farm and around our property.
    But, I found it especially interesting that, of all things my aunt chose to write about, she told me about fall butchering time on the farm.  And I’m so glad she did because, in many ways, what she wrote about is a lost skill.  Oh sure, we still have butcher shops in some rural communities, but gone are the days of farm and backyard butchering where neighbors helped each other with these chores.
    With permission granted by my cousin, Doug, to share his mother’s words, Aunt Shirley wrote, “What I remember the most was hog butchering time which was sometime in November.  It was a community project, usually two or three days.  Everyone who had pigs to butcher helped in the process, and they were hung in my father’s garage to cool overnight or until they were ready to be cut up.  Each one took their own [pig] home to process from that point on.  I always enjoyed helping cut ours up – to cut and skin the rind (or hide) off the fat, cut fat off the meat, grind and render it down into lard for cooking, cut meat into roasts, pork chops, tenderloin, and grind other remaining meat and scraps for sausage.  My father always cut and shaped the hams, then put them in large tubs with a salt brine to cure for several weeks.  Then he would take them out and smoke them in the smokehouse.  He would do the same with the sausage after grinding and stuffing it into the casings, and then shape that into links.  The hams were then put into large brown bags and hung in the cellar, and used as needed – and the same for the sausage.”
    Her description gives us a great overall picture of the process.  Further details on the butchering process can be found in the online Backwoods Home Magazine, Issue No. 23 from September/October 1993, with an appropriate article, “Slaughtering and Butchering,” by Dynah Geissal.  I enjoyed this very informative article in which Geissal gives excellent directions for the homesteader in butchering a variety of home-grown animals raised specifically for the freezer.  She describes how to cut the meat into appropriate sections, with photos to provide guiding details.  She even includes recipes for sausage, scrapple and other delicious fare.  
    Raised on a dairy farm, my husband was present twice when his father and uncles butchered cows on the farm.  Like my aunt wrote, Ed agreed that the best time to butcher is in the fall, typically November, because it’s cold enough to hang the carcass to avoid spoilage.  When cows were shipped to the butcher shop, he also said it was important to keep the animal as calm as possible before slaughter.  This helped keep the meat from becoming tough and unsavory. 
    On a smaller scale in backyard processing, my sister and I were the official assistants when it was time to dispatch designated unproductive chickens or specific meat birds to the freezer.  My father was in charge of swinging the axe on the chopping block.  And for those who have only heard the expression about someone running around like a chicken with their head cut off – let me assure you, it’s accurate!  After filling a 5-gallon bucket with boiling water, we sisters were given the honor of dunking and plucking.  With twine around their feet, we hung the scalded chickens from a nail in a barn beam and plucked those feathers clean off as best we could. 
    My mother was in charge of dressing the hens back in the kitchen.  Dressing is the more delicate term to describe the process of gutting and cleaning the bird.  I still vividly recall my mother showing us shell-less eggs from inside one of the hens – in descending sizes from the current large to tiny!  I was utterly fascinated!  I should perhaps mention at this point that once upon a time I had thoughts of becoming a veterinarian.  As science and math were not among my strong points, that dream soon fell by the wayside.
    We also raised pigs, three at a time.  And now I must confess that I had a tremendous fear of our cute little piglets simply from their noise and stench!  So, I refused to care for them, thus putting my younger brothers in charge of the feeding and cleaning of little piglets that grew into large hogs – really a good responsibility for my energetic brothers!  My dad knew when they’d reached sufficient poundage and sent them off to the butcher shop to become delicious pork in the freezer for us and our city relatives. 
    Our mare (granddaughter of the famous race horse, Man O' War), chickens, ducks and one goose (appropriately named “Honk” by my toddler brother) were my charges with the Muscovy ducks providing entertainment.  Digging a hole in the fenced-in chicken run, we sank a square galvanized tub for their bathing delight, and they regularly enjoyed “swim” time.  
    Only one duck decided to set on about a dozen eggs.  Four hatched properly and soon waddled behind their Mama to explore the great outdoors.  Feeling sorry for the fifth duckling who was late emerging from its shell, this writer took it upon herself to assist the poor little thing.  Unbeknownst to her at the time (she forgot to study), fowl do not need, nor do they desire, our assistance to hatch from their shell.  They have a “tooth” on their beak which assists them quite well; but, they also must do their own hatching in order to survive.  So, you guessed it – this little duckling did not live long once it had been helped out of its shell. 
    Then, a few days later, this caretaker came home from school and eagerly went out to care for her critters only to sadly discover one little duckling had drowned in the 2-inch-deep water dish in their pen.  That left three cute and fuzzy ducklings to follow the adults as they grew like weeds.  And, though a bit more greasy than chicken, they were absolutely delicious when my mother roasted them! (Yes, that was their intended purpose.)
    During the years that I stayed home to raise our children while my husband farmed with his dad, I grew a large garden every summer, canning and freezing a year’s worth of vegetables and fruit.  It sure helped save on grocery bills.  It was only natural I delved into this venture since my parents raised a large garden every year for as long as I can remember, as did both sets of grandparents.  But, as children, when we were sent out to weed our garden, my sister and I opted instead to run and play between the rows!  Truth be told, we even tossed some of the green beans under the lilac bushes when we decided we were tired of the chore of snapping them.  However, when they were my own gardens with food to be put up for the coming winter, I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of the process.
    But, as mentioned above, I’ve often wondered how our ancestors put their veggies up.  They didn’t have the benefit of a freezer, nor could they efficiently use water-bath jar canning let alone the fine tunings of a high-pressure cooker/canner like I had available. 

    So, in looking for books to study this subject, I recalled my bookshelf held my mother’s, “Putting Food By – The No.1 book about all the safe ways to preserve food.”  It’s a very useful book for beginners as it discusses all the prerequisites to canning and freezing vegetables and meats, including explanations of the old-fashioned methods our ancestors used to put up their food.
    Another excellent resource obtained through Spencer’s interlibrary loan system was “The Little House Cookbook, Frontier Foods from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Classic Stories” by Barbara M. Walker.  What a genuine treasure this book is as Ms. Walker expands on Wilder’s descriptions of the foods they ate by explaining how their food was prepared with innumerable appropriate recipes.
    A classic from the 19th century, Housekeeper and Healthkeeper (available only online and not through interlibrary loan) by Catherine E. Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe) discusses virtually every conceivable household dilemma for the housewife of the late 19th century.  Beecher’s own foreword is written to “My Dear Friends, - This volume embraces…many valuable portions of my other works on Domestic Economy…  It is designed to be a complete encyclopedia of all that relates to a woman’s duties as housekeeper, wife, mother, and nurse.”  Beecher includes five hundred recipes of which I perused a few.  She is completely thorough in all of her explanations to assist the housewife who often entered her new profession without foundational training.  I was impressed by Beecher’s ability to address every possible home situation from cooking and putting food by, to cleaning and caring for the sick family.   
    In our ancestors’ time a few hundred years ago, even through the end of the 19th century, most rural families had a milch (milk) cow or two.  Not only was the family’s delicious milk and cream supplied by their very own favorite pet cow, but Bossy’s milk also provided them the ability to make butter, cheese and ice cream.  Things just didn’t get any better than that!  And, extras could be sold or bartered for other necessities not readily available or too expensive at the general mercantile.
    Without electricity, one either had an ice house to keep foods cold, a storage area in the cellar, or a springhouse.  Root cellars were a popular place to store vegetables below the frost line.  Attics were often used to store food during the winter including hams, pumpkins, squashes, onions, and dried vegetables.  Perhaps the home had a storage shed just outside the back door.  Here, the family could conveniently store meat in a “natural freezer” during the winter months (though I’ve wondered about wild critters enjoying the free cache), along with stacked firewood, other supplies, and kettleware. 

    Then again, many homes had a large pantry just off the kitchen.  I remember well my Grandma Tillapaugh’s huge pantry with shelves on all sides and a door to the cellar, which I never did get to explore.  It was in this pantry that she kept her big tin of large scrumptious molasses cookies that we could help ourselves to when she gave approval.  Try as I might, I was never able to duplicate her delicious cookies though!
    My mother shared with me that their cellar held crates of apples and potatoes and other root vegetables. Not a root cellar per se`, my mom said that what was stored in crates kept quite well through the winter.  She also recalls her mother did use both pressure and waterbath canners for fruits and vegetables, along with canning pickled tongue and other meats at butchering time.  As my Aunt Shirley wrote about butchering time, their meat was put into a salt brine and stored in large wooden barrels or the old pottery crocks.  This process meant keeping the meat well covered by brine, held below the surface by a heavy weight.  Smoking was another great way to cure and preserve the meat to prevent spoilage and bacteria growth during storage over the long winter. 
    Brine, made of sugar, salt, saltpeter or sodium nitrate, and mixed with water, covered and cured meats placed in large crocks.  After the curing time of up to two months, the meat was typically smoked and then hung in the attic or cellar.  Or, you could fry the meat, place it in a crock, covering it with a layer of lard, then a layer of meat covered by lard until the crock was full.  The homemaker had only to dig out the amount of meat needed for a meal and reheat it.  These ever-handy crocks preserved other foods such as butter, pickles, sauerkraut, and even vegetables.  Apple cider was fermented to make hard cider, often a staple on the old farms.  Lard or paraffin was used to seal a crock’s contents, keeping out contaminants causing spoilage.  Read “The Many Uses of Pottery Crocks” by Jeannine Roediger (09/18/11).
    Before modern conveniences came along, root vegetables were typically stored in the cellar, or root cellar – especially potatoes, turnips, onions, beets, cabbages, carrots and even apples.  Areas that are cool, dark and dry help keep vegetables from sprouting, and slow any spoilage that might begin.  It was also a wise idea to store apples, potatoes and cabbages apart from each other and other produce so their odors/flavors did not spoil each other.  It was also a must to keep an eye on everything for early signs of spoilage.  Vegetables and certain fruits being stored could be wrapped individually in paper, or kept in baskets covered in sand, soil or dry leaves. 
    Reading the requirements in “Putting Food By,” we need to know a lot about the root cellar process that, on the surface, seems like such a simple idea – but it’s really not.  There are specific temperature and dryness or moisture requirements for the various vegetables and fruits to prevent mold and spoilage.
    I recall that in the early 1980s, I had an abundance of good-sized green tomatoes.  After picking them, we lay them out on the basement floor on newspaper to ripen, storing the greenest in a bushel basket with each one wrapped in newspaper.  They kept for a good while out in the garage where it was cold but not freezing.
    Another popular method was to dry fruits and vegetables, often simply by drying them in the sun.  Meat dried in this manner is called jerky.  If the home had a cookstove, drying could be accomplished on trays in the oven, or the vegetables and fruit could simply be put on strings and hung to dry in a warm area of the room.  The warm attic space near the chimney was another good place to dry food, using protection from dust and bugs.  Reconstitution by adding sufficient water for stewing was all it took to use these otherwise scarce foods during the cold and barren winter months.  Though they often lost some of the original flavor, dried veggies and fruits must have been a welcome addition to their diet during the cold winter months.  In the latter half of the 19th century, special driers with built-in furnaces became available on the market for home use in drying various fruits and vegetables.
    When thinking about the types of food eaten by our ancestors on the frontier, we need to remember that their salty and fatty dishes were necessary for their diet considering their involvement in extensive physical labor.  And to this any modern farmer can attest as their own hard work all day in the barn or fields contributes to a rather hearty appetite – I do remember how much Ed ate without gaining weight!
    Farmers and homesteaders had not only the typical farm chores to attend to in the hot summer and bitter cold winter, but they would hunt to supplement their meat supply, and put in a garden to reap the harvest of both vegetables and fruits.  If the homesteader did not have a ready supply of fruit on their own bushes and trees, searching the nearby forest often gave them a bounty of seasonal fruits and berries.  Yet, even in that venture, there was the ever-present danger of wild animals, especially bear.  The homesteaders’ hearty appetites and wide variety of unprocessed food allowed for a healthy diet which did not require today’s supplemental vitamins.
    My mother shared her memory years ago of pouring maple syrup (or cooked molasses and brown sugar) over snow which Laura Ingalls and her siblings did to make a delicious candy.  (Not recommended nowadays with the pollutants in our snow.)  As a teen, I remember making ice cream the old-fashioned way with a hand-turned crank – nothing tasted better when it was ready!  And my sister and I attempted to make divinity, once – it wasn’t perfect, but it was delicious!  Now, a favorite of mine is to make cashew brittle – the key being a candy thermometer which neither my sister and I nor Laura Ingalls’ family had available years ago.
    It required a lot of work on the part of every family member to hunt, raise and grow the family’s food, and then to put it up for the coming winter, year after year.  If they didn’t carefully follow the steps to properly preserve their food, a good deal of spoilage could and would occur due to various elements or critters.  And, at the time of which we write, the early 19th century, canning was not yet an available option for our homesteader.  Actually, the glass Mason canning jar with rubber ring and wire clasp was not available until 1858.  But then, of course, if you could afford it, you could simplify life and buy quality foods at the grocery or butcher shop in town to maintain a well-balanced diet throughout the unproductive winter months. 
    All things considered, we really do have an easier way of life.  But, what satisfaction our ancestors must have felt in putting by their own food!  I sure did when canning and freezing the produce of our gardens years ago.
  18. Linda Roorda
    County historical and genealogical societies are another great repository of data to aid in your research.  Among their resources are town and county historical books which often include brief lineages of early settlers, donated private family records, old family Bibles or transcripts of family data, transcribed census records, church and cemetery records, microfilm of various records including old newspapers, donated copies of wills or abstracts of wills, maps, rare books, donated specialty items, published family genealogies, and unpublished family manuscripts which can often be as accurate as any published composition, and so much more. 
    But, please remember that any family genealogy is only as good as the family’s recollections and the ability to provide solid documentation, so personal footwork is still necessary to clarify or prove data if source documentation cannot be provided.
    If you know where an ancestor lived, contact the corresponding county historical society.  You might be amazed at what may have already been researched, or what the folks can help you with, and how well they can point you in the right direction.  There is a research and copy fee at a historical society, though it is always less expensive to do your own research on the premises.  When I researched in the early 2000s, an average fee of $25/hour was charged by most societies to have their staff do your research (may cost more now).  I personally traveled to several historical societies; but, since that was not always feasible, I also paid for some to do my research. 
    Visit the online website for the town and county historical societies where you wish to obtain data.  If you want them to research, write a brief letter of request, include their base fee as listed online, and a self-addressed stamped envelope along with a brief description of information you seek.  As they respond in the order requests are received, it may be a few weeks before you receive a reply noting your request for research has been placed.
    By clarifying data on a family record form filed at both Tioga and Schoharie, NY county historical societies, I proved someone wrongly placed a daughter in my McNeill family.  I wrote the submitter for more information and her sources, but never received a reply.  There were two McNeil(l) families in Schoharie County.  Ruth McNeil married Matthew Lamont, removing to Owego, Tioga County, New York by 1825.  Matthew and his son, Marcus Lamont(e), purchased Hiawatha Island east of Owego on June 23, 1830 and operated a ferry across the Susquehanna River.  Marcus Lamont(e)’s son, Cyrenus McNeil Lamont, purchased the island in 1872 and ran the famous Hiawatha Hotel until 1887. 
    I proved Ruth (McNeil) Lamont did not belong to my McNeill family as had been listed on the above family history form.  Instead, I believe she was more likely the daughter of John and Ruth (Reynolds) McNeil, and thus named for her mother.  John and Ruth McNeil were originally from Vermont as per that McNeil family history writeup which I purchased from Montgomery County Dept. of History & Archives.  Per her sons’ census records, Ruth was born about 1782 in New York, the same year as my John C. McNeill’s proven daughter, Betsey, his oldest child. Betsey was actually adopted by her mother Hannah’s childless sister per New Hampshire records.
    Historical societies often have microfilm of local newspapers for birth, marriage, obituary and death notices.  Newspapers are a great source of collateral family data found in ads, public notices, or community event columns, i.e. the old-fashioned “gossip” columns which note the hosts and attendees of fashionable events.
    Other important historical society holdings include old church records which provide vital information for births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials.  Old baptism records often include not only the name of the infant and parents, but the sponsors/witnesses who were usually relatives or close friends.  Churches do not provide this data, but many older church records have been donated to historical societies.  Often, you will find that someone with an interest in preserving this information took the time and effort to transcribe original handwritten records into a neatly typed report.  The transcriber certifies his/her work to be true and accurate, retaining all original errors.  These records may be in manuscript form or in a published book.
    Town and county clerks’ offices are also invaluable resources.  Check the respective website for who to contact and what records they retain.  Marriage, birth and death records are typically kept by the respective town clerk where the event took place.  County clerk websites provide information on who to contact for genealogical research purposes.  The county clerk’s office maintains original state and federal census records, public land records (deeds, mortgages, liens, and maps), tax records, and wills, etc.  Family documentation can be found in wills (sometimes found at surrogate’s court), estate records for those who died intestate (without a will), inventories of estates, letters of administration, guardianships, etc.
    Always note the source to document your facts, i.e. book, author, publisher, date, page, for example:
    1. William E. Roscoe, History of Schoharie County, New York, 1713-1882. (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason & Co., 1882), p. 54. 
    2. John C. McNeill, Revolutionary War Pension File 20246.
    3. Mortgage Book B, pgs. 69-70, Schoharie County Clerk’s Office, Schoharie, Schoharie Co., NY.
    4. U.S. 1790 Census, Weare, Hillsborough Co., NH, p. 5, handwritten p. 332, line #9, NARA roll M637_5 (ancestry.com census record).
    When appropriate, you may certainly state data was found on personal visit to a specific named cemetery (be sure to include the address), a personal conversation with someone specific, or in a box of letters found in Grandma’s attic.  Don’t forget to also note dates of visits and conversations, and full names, including maiden and married surnames.
    By keeping solid research documentation, it will always be available to validate your findings as needed.  You will never regret the extra effort.  Because, now, a number of years after I concluded my family research, my memory is not as great as the walking encyclopedia of family data that it once was.
    NEXT:  Cemetery Records.
  19. Linda Roorda
    I'm sharing something a little different today.  Yesterday would have been our Jenn’s 43rd birthday, now celebrated in her heavenly home. As family and friends, we never forget a loved one who has left us, especially sooner than we expect.  Yet, we can remember and celebrate their life with joy as a blessing from God. Today, rather than a poetry reflection, I’d like to share memories in Jenn’s own words from psychology class at Houghton College.  It gave me insight into her thoughts, experiences, understanding of her family, and thoughts on her future.  This is what I longed for after she died – something in her own writing, her perceptive memories, providing a window into the heart and soul of who she had become.
    With a double major of elementary education and psychology at Houghton College, she earned her Master’s degree as a School Psychologist from Alfred University a month before she left this world the end of June 2003 at age 25.  I found comfort and peace in writing about her life that summer and fall, a healing catharsis, and appreciated reading her college papers, like the one below, and learning more about who she was as a young adult. May you be blessed in your own memories of loved ones who have left this world before "their time."
    UNIT ONE:  Childhood Recollections and Experiences:
    Jenn drew a floor plan of our house, and was asked to “sit quietly and try to recapture the sights and sounds and smells of each room,” and “the experiences and feelings [she] associated with each.”
    A – Who lived in this house with you?  When we first moved into this house, my family consisted of my mom, dad, sister & myself.  However, the house was built while my mom was pregnant w/ my little brother.  He joined our family two months after we moved into this house.
    B – What was your favorite place?  Why?  My favorite place was the basement because a section of it was set up as a playroom.  I spent hrs. playing here w/ my sister & brother.
    C – Where were your secret places?  I don’t remember having any secret places.  Mom kept pretty good track of me & my siblings.
    D – What room or area of the house do you remember as the most unpleasant or uncomfortable for you?  Why?  I didn’t like having to go to the basement at night when it was dark.  I wouldn’t leave the safety of the stairs until I had turned on the lights.  I disliked having to retrieve something from the garage the most.  This was because it was dark, damp, cold & quite (sic, quiet).  I was afraid something would get me when I opened the door.  I also remember us having a slight problem w/ a mouse in the basement when we first moved in.  That may have contributed to [my] fear.
    E – What was the prevailing atmosphere or mood in your house?  Before I was nine, I remember the mood being fairly cheerful.  Afterwards, the atmosphere was filled with some tension, worry, & yet also a lot love & caring.
    F – What was your most significant experience during the time you lived in this house?  How was this experience significant?  When I was in 2nd grade, my grandparents had to sell the family farm b/c my dad could no longer help his father.  My dad’s eyesight was deteriorating.  Over the years. he continued to lose what little sight he had & he eventually was declared blind.  This experience put a lot of stress on my family, especially my parents’ marriage.  But our faith in God held us together & pulled us through this difficult time.  As a family unit, we are much closer now.  Family is very important to me.  I learned important lessons about being supportive to others & persevering through hard times.  I also had to mature quicker as the oldest child & take responsibility for my sister & brother.  Note:  My dad now works as a customer service manager for a local company.
    G. Think about your early experiences with your family at mealtime.  Family mealtime (supper) was my favorite part of the day. We would all get a chance to discuss our day of school or work, sharing disappointments, as well as exciting news. It was also a time filled w/ humor & laughter.  My Dad, sister, & brother were gifted w/ a sense of humor, & always had my mom & [me] laughing so hard it hurt! I know we also had conflict w/ one another at the table, but all the good experiences dominate my memory overwhelmingly. After eating we almost always had family devotions.  These have changed as my siblings & I have grown up.  First my parents read Bible stories to us.  Then once we learned to read, we all took turns reading the stories.  Now we read the “Daily Bread” booklet.  These experiences really pulled us together.  I believe this is one activity that helped us through my dad’s blindness.  I will forever be thankful for these good times &hope to continue the tradition when I marry & have children.
    I have learned how much I value my family.  They are so important to me.  They are my support, my source of encouragement & of love.  The exercise on mealtime was the most valuable exercise as it made clear the importance I place on family.
    UNIT THREE:  Alfred Adler and Individual Psychology:
    I - Early Recollections:  “To understand a man we must know his memories.”  --Ancient Chinese Proverb
    A.  Beginning with your first recollection, identify your earliest specific memories.
    1 – My earliest memories begin in the trailer my family lived in from the time I was born until I was 4.  I remember that when I was about 2-1/2, I would crawl into my sister’s crib in the morning.  I was really proud of my baby sister.  I liked talking to her & playing w/ stuffed animals with her until mom got us up.
    2 – Another memory from the trailer that I have is when my family got a dishwasher.  However, my sister & I were more interested in the box that it came in than the dishwasher itself.  My mom put the box in the backroom & my sister & I would often play in it.  Our favorite game was to put a larger than normal beanbag on a small cart that some wooden letter blocks normally set on & place that cart on top of the box.  Then we would crawl inside and shake the box until the cart fell off.  Then we would repeat the process.  It was simple but great fun.
    3 – I remember moving in August from our trailer into our newly built house.  I remember going from room to room, checking everything out. The coolest part was the stairs.  For some reason my sister & I were absolutely fascinated by them.  Once we were fully moved in, we would pretend to have picnics on them.  Once again, it was simple but great fun.
    4 – In October, my brother was born.  I don’t remember a whole lot about this.  However, I do remember my dad dropping my sister & [me] off at my aunt’s house and picking us up at night for about 2 days or so.  I remember being excited about getting a new brother, but I also missed my mom & couldn’t wait for her to come home to play & read books again.
    5 – I remember going to the family farm & spending time in the barn w/ my dad & my grandfather.  I liked to sit on top of the feed cart w/ my own little scoop so I could “help” feed the cows. I also liked playing w/ the barn cats, & mixing up the formula for the calves.  I felt grown up when my dad would let me carry the flashlight as we walked home at night or allow me to help carry the milk pail.  I also liked riding on the tractors w/ my dad.  The only bad experience that I remember from the barn was a time that I was following my dad & was running to keep up.  I cut a corner too tight & ended up face down in the gutter of manure.  My dad picked me up and carried me home so mom could clean me off.
    II.  Reflect upon your early memories. My memories seem to be focused on experiences primarily w/ my sister (i.e. memories 1-3). We did everything together as kids & even today I feel close to her.  I am also close to my brother.  Overall, I think my memories reveal my strong attachment to family.  My memories reveal a happy environment in which I received love & had enjoyable times.  My family is very close-knit.  I think this has helped us in our times of trouble, b/c we knew we could lean on one another.
    As for explaining my present personality, I think the closeness & the trust that I built w/ my sister & my family as a whole has led to my tendency to trust others. I also think the pride I mention in memories about my siblings reveals my tendency to act “motherish” at times, specifically w/ my siblings.  My early experiences in the barn represent an early introduction to responsibility & my dedication to getting a job done on time.
    B.  Inferiority Feelings:  Adler believed inferiority feelings form the basis for all human motivation and striving. 
    Once my sister & I were both in school, I began to have feelings of inferiority. She always wanted to do what I could do, and once she learned it, she often performed better than I did.  I felt threatened; as the oldest child, I wanted to maintain my “superior” position.  I didn’t have an inferior organ, nor did anyone receive excessive indulgence & pampering, & I wasn’t rejected or neglected by anyone.  My parents consistently worked to temper any competition, & establish the fact that we each have our own individual qualities & strengths.
    E.  Style of Life: Adler believed basic life-style patterns and structures of personality are established early in life… 
    I value friendship.  I think it may come from the close companionship that developed b/t my sister & I as children.  I also don’t like conflict.  My mom deterred my siblings & I from fighting.  I remember having to sit on the couch & hold hands for several minutes after having arguments w/ them.  I also didn’t like seeing my parents fight during a stressful time in our home & try to steer away from it myself.  I’ve also been a very quiet & compliant child.  I allow other people to dominate conversation & I go along w/ the majority consensus – typically.  There are of course exceptions.
    I think I am a combination of the avoiding type and the socially useful type.  I like to avoid conflict. I know how to get around issues & how to choose my words wisely to keep from causing a problem.  However, when a problem does arise that requires attention, I do face reality & attempt to solve it.
    I also admit that I am shy & do not talk a lot.  But, those people who know me well, realize I am very interested in social activity. I care about others and wish to help them out as needed.  I also enjoy being involved in committees and other extra-curricular activities.  I was quite involved while in high school.  However, since entering college, I have found myself having to concentrate more time on studies & have not been able to do a lot of other things.
    G.  What are some of the important things you have learned about yourself?
    This entire unit on Adler’s theory of personality was very interesting & helped me learn a lot about myself.  I discovered how oriented I am around achieving excellence & wanting to be the best I can be in all areas of life. Working with children also seems to be a highly important thing for me.  I have a genuine concern for children who don’t have the same opportunities to succeed that I had.
    UNIT SIX:  Psychosocial Theory:
    1.a.  Think back to your early years in school.  Was this a discouraging time for you, or were you able to achieve success in learning and developing the skills necessary? I don’t remember a concentrated time of frustration although I did struggle with learning some things as any child does.  For example, in 1st grade I had a hard time learning to read.  With extra help from my parents at home, I soon caught on & excelled. However, I had already been molded into a stereotype at school and could not move out of the lower reading groups because of it.  So my parents stimulated my reading interests at home.  I think their efforts kept me from giving up.  In other subjects I tended to succeed & overall I enjoyed school.
    1b. My parents helped me a great deal with reading & I grew to enjoy it & excel at it.  I also remember participating in 4H.  A neighbor lady held meetings in her home once a week.  I enjoyed this & did well at cooking contests.  
    2.  In efforts to establish a stable ego identity, has your quest for an occupational identity been a major concern?  Maybe, to a certain extent.  I know that I want to work with children in some way, shape or form.  But I haven’t been able to fully identify what it is I want to do. I have thought about teaching elementary school and thus, I am an El. Ed. major.   I also have considered some kind of counseling, or maybe even a school psychologist. Thus I am also a double major in psychology.  I am slightly confused about which way to turn, but I haven’t totally panicked yet.  But my identity has not been solely based on my future occupation. There is more to who I am than the job will hold after school.  I trust God in that area of my life and have tried to develop my other characteristics.
    3.  We are living in a time of changing sex roles and patterns, and there is much sex-role confusion in our society.  Have these social changes contributed to your personal difficulties in achieving a stable ego identity?  No, this has not influenced me at all.  I come from a “non-traditional” home in some sense, because my dad is blind and I’m used to him being a house-husband.  He, of course, does have a regular job now, but he continues to help my mom out with laundry and grocery lists and cooking, etc.  I believe both males and females can share in household duties.  I also see nothing wrong with a woman choosing to be a housewife. If I ever have children, it is in fact my desire to stay home to simply be a mom and a wife.
    As far as occupations go, I think each person should do something that will best use their skills and talents and will make them happy.  I, however, am against any legislation that will make it mandatory for men and women to be absolutely equal.
    5.  Discuss the strengths you have developed and the tasks yet to be completed.  I think I have established a stable ego identity.  The values I have formed are ones I hold to quite strictly.  I am capable of handling responsibility given to me by others.   I have set goals for myself and am considering various options for my future beyond Houghton.  I know I am shy, yet able to voice my opinion when necessary.  I have established preferences for what I like to do in my free time, food I like to eat, etc.   I generally know who I am and am satisfied with the roles that I play in the relationships I have with family, friends, etc.   
    6.  Am I strong enough in my identity to fuse myself with another without fear of losing my own identity, autonomy, and integrity?  I think I am ready and have been ready to be in a close relationship with another person.  I know who I am as a person.  I have confidence in my special skills and abilities and I am able to respect others for who they are and am willing to help as needed. I began my first ever relationship almost exactly a year ago.  It has been a very healthy and satisfying relationship.  We get along very well.  We are both mature individuals and are able to discuss our differences (when they occur) in an appropriate manner.  We have also had to deal with our relationship being long distance.  We have very open communication lines with a “no secrets” policy. We also allow each other to continue the development of our varying interests.  We are both interested in learning about what the other person does or likes.  Lastly, we build each other up and encourage one another in our individual pursuits.  We complement each other well and I am grateful for him being a part of my life.
    7.  How are your mother and father each expressing and developing ego maturity through generativity?  I remember when I first left home to come to Houghton and the difficulty my mom had with “losing” her first born.  She cried a bit.  However, it has gradually gotten easier.  She recently made a comment that she and my dad will like having the house to themselves after having a weekend of no kids.  I had to smile.  My mom is also becoming engrossed in a genealogy project of my dad’s family and would like to do one of her own family. It’s a little harder for my dad since he’s blind.  He can’t just choose to do something.  He doesn’t appear to be bothered, but I can’t really judge for sure.
    F.  Old age – integrity versus despair with old age, the final psychosocial stage of ego development and maturity. 
    (Note: I am talking about my dad’s parents since I see them more often.)  I think my grandparents are developing integrity as they are now in the final stage of ego affirmation.  They are both still very much in love with each other.  They also have an excellent sense of humor.  Laughter can be expected when we visit them.  I also enjoy hearing about the past – including experiences that were good and others that were bad.  No matter how a situation turned out, they’ve accepted it and have moved on with life.  They are also very willing to help others and to give advice.  Before my sister and I got a car this semester, my grandparents helped my mom with the task of driving us back to Houghton after breaks.  They do, of course, have problems, but generally I think they are quite well adjusted into their last stage of development.
    G.  Summary - What are some of the important things you have learned about yourself after doing these exercises?
    I have learned that the environment my parents provided me as a child and as a teen has facilitated a healthy outcome at all of Erikson’s stages.  I also think my faith in God has been an asset in my development.  It helps with things like careers to know that God is in control and He will guide you.  He has been a source of strength through all sort of problems and trials, and a blessing in times of happiness.  In addition, I’ve learned how important healthy relationships with others are in developing yourself.
    The entire unit was quite informative and I found it interesting to reflect on the issues that were raised.
    Professor:  Great – A wonderful job overall!  Thanks Jennifer!
  20. Linda Roorda

    The Good Ol' Days!

    By Linda Roorda,

    Today, I’m celebrating the gift of my mother.  Growing up, we heard very little about my Mom’s childhood years, though I loved visiting my relatives on The Farm, sleeping in the big feather bed with feather blankets and pillows, admiring all the antiques, waking up to the clinking milk cans being put on the truck to go to the creamery, walking through the barn and fields with cousins Sandy and Gary, eating my first bowl of Life cereal at their huge table, the kitchen with floor to ceiling cabinets from one end to the other, and playing inside the big farmhouse. This was a place I loved, of which I carry my own special memories. Enjoy this look back to my mother’s childhood, a time and place that emanates the images of “home.
    My mother, Reba, was born and raised on a farm in Carlisle, Schoharie County, NY at the corner of Cemetery Road with the house fronting Rt. 20, the Great Western Turnpike.  Her parents were Leo Jacob and Laura Eliza (McNeill) Tillapaugh. 
    As #11 of 12 kids, Reba grew up on a large dairy farm which included pigs and about 3000 chickens, with draft horses/black Shires doing the field work.  They did okay during the Great Depression because their farm and large garden provided food for winter.  Her parents drilled a well for running water after they’d been married about 20 years and had 10 kids, with two more to follow.  I cannot imagine the work of running a home and farm, and a large family, without running water! 
    Grandma T. cooked large meals every day, made delicious homemade bread in a kitchen woodstove oven, made scrumptious cookies (I remember her big tin of molasses cookies in the huge pantry from which she let us get our own cookies, after we asked her of course!), homemade ice cream, plus fed traveling crews at harvest time.  She also found time to tat and embroider, raise a vegetable garden to can for winter, grew gorgeous flowers, visited the sick and shut-ins, and more.
    My mom remembers that the winters were much worse than they are today.  “It seems like it got cold earlier in the fall than now.  We would pick drop apples in the fall and have cider made.  My mother kept a 20-gal. crock by the back door of the farmhouse.  I remember coming home after school and running to that crock, breaking the ice, and drinking some of that tasty cider! 
    My favorite black farm cat, Skippy, had 7 toes on his front feet; he’d stand on his hind feet, reach up and turn doorknobs with his front paws!!
    I attended the one-room schoolhouse, William Golding, which used a dry cell system for power like my dad did before electric was put in, and the school had an outhouse.  My favorite teacher in the one-room schoolhouse was Miss Santora who went skiing in the fields with us kids!  We had a big woodstove in the center of the schoolhouse, and when it was very cold we would sit around it to keep warm.  I remember the temperature was -25 degrees one morning, but my father was not able to convince the principal to close school that day.  Somehow, we got there, but then it closed at noon.  My sister and I tried to walk home but it was hard to breathe in the bitter cold and wind, so we called my father to pick us up at the Brand Restaurant opposite the school.
    It was normal to get 2 feet of snow in storms or blizzards.  The wind was so bad in big snowstorms you didn’t know which way you were going.  I’m told that in the Oswego area, people tied a rope around their waist to keep from being lost.  We didn’t think of that but we always made it. 
    My father had a big wooden scoop pulled by the horses to clear snow out of the driveway.  In 1943, my father bought a Massey-Harris tractor; later he had the steel lug wheels changed to rubber tires, and a plow was rigged on that tractor.  We had an ice storm, I believe in February 1943, and light poles snapped like toothpicks.  The town had an old Lynn Tractor and it was used to plow town roads; for state roads, they had big motorized trucks.  I don’t know what they did to clear the roads before tractors and trucks were available, but I assume horses were used.
    I think it was in 1945 or 1947 when the snow came and the wind blew for three weeks, and we were out of school all that time!  Drifts were so high and hard we could walk the horses on top.  The workers broke all the snowplows in town, but the county had a snow blower which was used to open all the roads.  I heard they had to keep the blower between the light pole wires as they could not tell where the road was.  I don’t know how my dad and other farmers got their milk to the creamery then, but, again, I assume they used horses.
    Rt. 20 was the first to be kept open in snowstorms.  My parents often put people up overnight when the road conditions became terrible.  Before Rt. 20 was widened about 1941, the road was very slippery when raining and was icy in winter.  One time a Greyhound bus went off the road and into the field off Rt. 20, south of our house.  They used a bulldozer to pull it out of the field. 
    A state trooper would ride a big Harley during the summer.  When he arrested someone, my dad, as justice of the peace, would hold court downstairs; we would be in the room above the dining room, listening through a stovepipe hole!
    We had at least 3000 chickens in a building west of the main house and we kids helped to water and feed them.  My mother candled dozens and dozens of eggs every Sunday evening for hours.  The eggs were kept cool in the basement, being weighed, cleaned, candled, and crated by hand on Sunday night, with as many as 7 large crates of 30 dozen eggs going to the hatchery in Albany every Monday morning.  My mother candled hundreds and hundreds of eggs to ensure a quality product was in those crates for the hatchery. 
    We took milk to the creamery every day in traditional milk cans, and supplied wood to heat not only our house but the church and one-room school.  We raised several pigs with my father holding a neighborhood butchering day on our farm.  After the butchering was done, he cut up meat for the smokehouse, put some in crocks of salt brine, and made homemade sausage, etc.
    As gangs of local farmers traveled from farm to farm to help each other at harvest, my mother fed the crews when our farm was harvested.  She had all her recipes tucked away in her head, and made the most delicious ice cream, hand cranked by us kids clamoring for a turn!  She even shared beautiful flowers from her gardens with local shut-ins.
    About 1938 or 1939, Admiral Byrd’s snowmobile, the Snow Cruiser, was run up Rt. 20 on its way to Antarctica. As a child, age 5 or 6, I was afraid to go inside when it stopped near our farm on Rt.20.  The rubber tires were not appropriate for use in the severe cold, and it was abandoned in Antarctica.  There was an article and photo about it in the July/August 1996 “Reminisce” magazine, pp. 39-40.”
    My family made our own maple syrup and sold some, and still do that now.  Back when I was little, my brothers would tap 300 maple trees for sap to be boiled down to syrup, so sugar rationing during World War II was not a problem for us.  We trudged through deep snow in the woods each spring to help.  My brothers also cut ice off the ponds in the winter, stacking and packing it in sawdust in the icehouse on the back side of the barn.  Ice was cut from farm to farm the same way summer crops were harvested - by harvesting bees of many farmers working together.  It doesn’t seem like ponds freeze over long enough or thick enough to do this now.  That ice sure helped make my mother’s delicious ice cream – I think hers was the best at the ice cream socials!
    ~~
    I, Linda, remember my mother Reba saying she and her next older sister Shirley, and youngest sister Lois, were in the 4-H with a lot of pins and awards. When fair time came, they got vegetables ready for show at the Cobleskill Fair, forcing mom into canning and freezing. Lois remembers we dug up all the veggies in the garden in order to display 'uniform' vegetables!!!  Thinking back, Lois says, “she might have wanted to kill us, but it kept us grounded and out of trouble. Wouldn't trade it…!”  My cousin Allan remembered our Aunt Lois trying to ride a heifer to their house as if it was a horse. OH THE GOOD OLD DAYS!!!!!!!!
    My Mom also shared that growing up in the Great Depression you made your own fun.  She remembered her father had an old school bus, and the kids would go there go in there to play and sit and talk.  At Christmas there was a very large family gathering at the long table.  She helped walk the draft horses, black Shires, to pull the ropes which helped her brothers put the hay up into the mow.  She and a few of the younger sibs took their Little Red Wagon out by the road to pick up the grass mown by the hi-way dept. They’d pile the wagon high, and pull it back to the barn. Mind you, this was in the days of real horsepower.  So, imitating how their dad and older brothers put hay up into the mow with the huge hayforks on rope pulleys with the horses doing the work, she and her sibs took ice tongs and smaller ropes, slinging the rope up over the pipes above the cow stanchions.  With kids on each side, the ice tongs held bits of hay as the kids on the other side lugged on the rope to pull the hay up and over, and down into the feeding trough for the cows!  Now that’s imagination!  Reminds me how I used to milk cows when I was 4-5.  In the barn with my dad as he milked in Marion, NY, I stood on a bale of hay, moving an old teakettle along on the road-side wall ledge, I’d stop to “milk a cow” every few inches! 
    My mother’s father was a jack-of-all trades, not just a farmer, but a man before his time.  It was from him that I inherited green eyes.  He built a top-quality registered Holstein herd with Canadian Holstein-Friesian bulls before most other farmers.  I remember seeing the bulls as a kid in their pens as I peered between cracks in their wooden stalls.  Besides a dairy herd and chickens, he raised pigs, and sold extra hay. He took community responsibility seriously as Carlisle town highway superintendent, Carlisle school superintendent, Justice of the Peace, and Cobleskill school board member and president. A highly respected man of the community was my Grandpa Leo, as well as Grandma Laura.
  21. Linda Roorda

    Heroes of Yesterday

    By Linda Roorda,

    I’ve read books or stories from virtually every war in which men and women of our nation, including my immediate family, relatives and ancestors, have been involved.  Their sacrifices have deeply touched my heart as I live a life of freedom, a blessing either limited or unknown to so many elsewhere in this world.  Yet, our families have not known a loss of life in war during this past century.
    A few years ago, friends of ours shared some treasured family papers with me before the reign of Covid-19 when friends could freely visit.  Several boxes of treasures were given to this friend by a relative, mementoes she never knew her mother had kept.  They included old photographs and newspaper clippings.  What especially touched her heart were family photos and letters, especially from one of her brothers who had died in World War II.
    Her mother had saved numerous clippings of the war from a local Binghamton newspaper.  Here were reports of a war’s ups and downs, of the efforts of battle-worn troops, of men who paid the ultimate sacrifice, and of soldiers who returned home safely.  Also included were touching news reports by Ernie Pyle, a reporter embedded with troops in the European theater and later in the South Pacific. 

    Pyle was a beloved reporter in the U.S. and abroad.  He had a way with words, evoking an empathy from his readers for the servicemen he wrote about.  A reporter who opened his readers’ eyes, he put a personal touch to the effects of war, and to the emotions of hard-won battles for freedom’s sake.  I remember him well… no, I did not grow up during the war, but had purchased and read his book, “Brave Men,” as a teen.  Perusing through my friend’s papers, I knew I had to take Pyle’s book down off my bookshelf and refresh my memory. 
    As I continued to read through my friend's papers, thoughts and emotions swirled around and the poem below began taking shape.  I have always been grateful to those men and women who have joined the military to protect our freedoms and to gain the same for the oppressed around the world.  But to think about each one who has ever gone off to war, to remember them as their family knew and loved them so well… is to contemplate the little child who ran into the loving arms of parents with boundless energy, full of love and joy… the playing and learning he or she did under their wise and watchful eyes… the teen coming to terms with adolescent struggles… the young adult who emerged from military basic training with a new sense of purpose… the seasoned soldier whose loyalty to his or her unit proved a perseverance and bravery they never thought they had… and the final tribute paid to one who gave his or her all that others might live… is to contemplate the heart and soul of each one who left behind a sweetheart or spouse, beloved parents and siblings, and even children… the one forever remembered for a life interrupted, of the great sacrifice made, and of the legacy now carried in the heart and soul of those who have grieved their loss.
    As we celebrate Veterans’ Day today, may this simple poem evoke in you a heart of thanks for all who have served and returned home safely, or who paid the ultimate sacrifice in any war.  Without a willingness to put their lives on the line for the sake of freedom, we would not be enjoying our “…land of the brave and home of the free.” 
    Thank you to each of you who has served in the military, and thank you to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice with their life.
    Heroes of Yesterday
    Linda A. Roorda
    Where tyranny reigns evil’s at the helm
    As the young and free who know only peace
    With faces brave must enter the fray
    In the fight for rights we take for granted.
    ~
    Responsibility trains boys into men
    With troop cohesion, a unit’s tight bond
    To honor and hold each life in their care
    For freedom’s defense and the rights of all.
    ~
    Orders to battle and the hell of war
    The call to arms which tests the mettle
    For within each heart lies the chance to prove
    The value of truth to fail or succeed.
    ~
    From red alert to general quarters
    Emotions run deep in calm before strife
    Of imminent fight and future yearnings
    Always thinking, “If I get through…alive…”*
    ~
    The sounds of war above stealth and fear
    The zing of bullets and bombs that explode
    Challenges met, overcome with courage
    Proving capable the common valor.
    ~
    Back home they reflect, living fear and dread
    Loved ones waiting for word from afar
    A card or letter received with relief
    Until the knock comes when time stands still.
    ~
    The letters home that ceased too soon
    As horrors of war burn deep in the soul
    Who’ll be the judge at the end of combat
    What the heart ponders to serve and protect…
    ~
    To gain advantage with success for peace
    To hold these truths that all may live free
    To lift the spirit and rebuild from loss
    As we remember peace has a cost.
    ~~
    *”Brave Men,” Ernie Pyle, Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1944, p.5
  22. Linda Roorda
    If I give all but haven’t got love… then what good is my all that I have given… for what good is the giving without the right intentions?
    The biblical love chapter, I Corinthians 13, says it so well. We can’t perfect on those great words.  But I do enjoy putting my own words to the intent of Scripture… that exercise helps me contemplate the deeper meaning and truth within God’s Holy Word.  And if a poem emerges for us to enjoy, then praise goes to the Lord for helping me find the right words.
    I once saw a poster with the words, “Love isn’t love until you give it away.”  I focused on those words and their meaning.  They burned a path into my thoughts, and became forever embedded… for they were the words that saw me through labor the afternoon that my second daughter, Emily, was born… and I gave my love away to a beautiful precious little girl.
    Love is a meaningless word unless there is meaning behind the word love.  On giving even the least of gifts, if it comes from the heart, the depth of caring is felt and treasured by the receiver.  With faith and hope, we cherish each other from a heart of true love… it’s simply unmistakable.
    But it can also be said that the opposite of love is a rude and self-serving attitude.  Yet, even in this, love can break through.  Though accountability may be necessary to explain and denote the wrongs that were committed, when genuine repentance meets true love and forgiveness they walk hand in hand, and the wrongs are forgotten.  How like the grace-filled love we receive from our Lord!  When we confess and repent our wrongs, He showers us with His all… as mercy and grace flow over us with overwhelming love and forgiveness.
    If I give all with love, how I give will reveal the depth of love in my heart… 
    If I Give All
    Linda A. Roorda
    (based on I Corinthians 13)
    If I give all but haven’t got love
    Where is my heart when the poor I aid,
    For without love nothing will I gain
    When glory I seek in praises of men.
     
    And if I speak in language diverse
    Expounding on life and the meaning thereof,
    And should I teach, mysteries to explain
    But don’t have love, how foolish the sage.
     
    For love is clothed in virtues of truth
    Is patiently kind without envy’s greed
    With modesty’s joy and humility’s garb
    Courteous to all, a generous heart.
     
    An evil heart is not my delight
    In truth alone does wisdom rejoice
    For love that trusts and always protects
    Will always hope and always persevere.
     
    I once was a child in actions and words
    But as I matured, reason spoke wisdom
    As I left behind my childish ways
    To reveal in part imperfections laid bare.
     
    For if I give all with a heart of joy
    Integrity’s voice will lead the way
    As faith, hope and love remain resolute
    Convincing the world the greatest is love.
    ~~
    2015
     
  23. Linda Roorda
    Today, I’m celebrating the gift of my mother. When I pulled this together, she was still with us, though terminal. Sadly, she passed away late Monday night, August 23, a month before turning 88. Through her hospitalization and return to the nursing home, I was once again reminded how thankful to be for each new day.  Growing up, we kids heard very little about my Mom’s growing up, though I loved visiting my relatives on The Farm, sleeping in the big feather bed with feather blankets and pillows, admiring all the antiques, waking up to the clinking milk cans put on the truck to go to the creamery, walking through the barn and fields with cousins Sandy and Gary, seeing the opening to a ground cave whose waters came out in Cobleskill, eating my first bowl ever of Life cereal at their huge table, the large kitchen with floor to ceiling cabinets from one end to the other along one wall, and playing inside the big farmhouse where once upon a time my mom and her siblings slid down the long railing on the stairs. This was a place I loved, of which I carry my own special memories. Enjoy this look back to my mother’s childhood, the "good ol' days", a time and place that emanates with images of “home.”   
    My mother, Reba (Tillapaugh) Visscher was born and raised on a farm in Carlisle, NY at the corner of Cemetery Road and Rt. 20, the Great Western Turnpike. Her parents were Leo and Laura (McNeill) Tillapaugh. 
    As #11 of 12 kids, she grew up on a large dairy farm which included pigs and about 3000 chickens, and the ubiquitous draft horses for field work.  They did okay during the depression because their farm and large garden provided food for the family.  Her parents drilled a well for running water after they’d been married about 20 years and had 10 kids.  Though they had an old pump to bring water up in the well, I cannot imagine the work of running a home and farm, and a large family, without running water! 
    Grandma T. cooked large meals every day, made delicious homemade bread in her old-fashioned woodstove oven, made scrumptious cookies (I fondly remember her big tin of molasses cookies in the huge pantry from which she let us get our own cookies, after we asked her of course!), homemade ice cream, plus fed traveling crews at harvest time.  She also found time to tat and embroider, raise a vegetable garden to can for winter, grew gorgeous flowers, visited the sick and shut-ins, and more.
    My mom remembers that the winters were much worse than they are today -  “It seems like it got cold earlier in the fall than now.  We would pick drop apples in the fall and have cider made.  My mother kept a 20-gal. crock by the back door of the farmhouse.  I remember coming home after school and running to that crock, breaking the ice, and drinking some of that tasty cider!  My favorite black farm cat, Skippy, had 7 toes on his front feet; he’d stand on his hind feet, reach up and turn doorknobs with his front paws!!
    I attended the one-room schoolhouse, William Golding, which used a dry cell system for power like my dad did before electric was put in, and the school had an outhouse.  My favorite teacher in the one-room schoolhouse was Miss Santora who went skiing in the fields with us kids!  We had a big woodstove in the center of the schoolhouse, and when it was very cold we would sit around it to keep warm.  I remember the temperature was -25 degrees one morning, but my father was not able to convince the principal to close school that day.  Somehow, we got there, but then it closed at noon.  My sister and I tried to walk home but it was hard to breathe in the bitter cold and wind, so we called my father to pick us up at the Brand Restaurant opposite the school. 
    It was normal to get 2 feet of snow in storms or blizzards.  The wind was so bad in big snowstorms you didn’t know which way you were going.  I’m told that in the Oswego area, people tied a rope around their waist to keep from being lost.  We didn’t think of that, but we always made it. 
    My father had a big wooden scoop pulled by the horses to clear snow out of the driveway.  In 1943, my father bought a Massey-Harris tractor; later he had the steel lug wheels changed to rubber tires, and a plow was rigged on that tractor.  We had an ice storm, I believe in February 1943, and light poles snapped like toothpicks.  The town had an old Lynn Tractor and it was used to plow town roads; for state roads, they had big motorized trucks.  I don’t know what they did to clear the roads before tractors and trucks were available, but I assume horses were used.
    I think it was in 1945 or 1947 when the snow came and the wind blew for three weeks, and we were out of school all that time!  Drifts were so high and hard we could walk the horses on top.  The workers broke all the snowplows in town, but the county had a snow blower which was used to open all the roads.  I heard they had to keep the blower between the light pole wires as they could not tell where the road was.  I don’t know how my dad and other farmers got their milk to the creamery then, but, again, I assume they used horses.
    Rt. 20 was the first to be kept open in snowstorms.  My parents often put people up overnight when the road conditions became terrible.  Before Rt. 20 was widened about 1941, the road was very slippery when raining and was icy in winter.  One time a Greyhound bus went off the road and into the field off Rt. 20, south of our house.  They used a bulldozer to pull it out of the field. 
    A state trooper would ride a big Harley during the summer.  When he arrested someone, my dad, as justice of the peace, would hold court downstairs; we would be in the room above the dining room, listening through a stovepipe hole!
    We had about 3000 chickens in a building west of the main house and we kids helped to water and feed them.  The eggs were weighed, cleaned and crated by hand on Sunday night, and sometimes as many as 7 large crates of eggs went to the hatchery in Albany every Monday morning.  My mother candled hundreds and hundreds of eggs to ensure a quality product was in those crates. 
    We took milk to the creamery every day in traditional milk cans, and supplied wood to heat not only our house but the church and one-room school.  We raised several pigs with my father holding a neighborhood butchering day on our farm in the fall.  After the butchering was done, he cut up meat for the smokehouse, put some in crocks of salt brine, and made homemade sausage, etc.
    As gangs of local farmers traveled from farm to farm to help each other at harvest, my mother fed the crews when our farm was harvested.  She had all her recipes tucked away in her head, and made the most delicious ice cream, hand cranked by us kids clamoring for a turn!  She even shared beautiful flowers from her gardens with local shut-ins.
    About 1938 or 1939, Admiral Byrd’s snowmobile, the Snow Cruiser, was run up Rt. 20 on its way to Antarctica. As a child, age 5 or 6, I was afraid to go inside when it stopped near our farm on Rt.20.  The rubber tires were not appropriate for use in the severe cold, and it was abandoned in Antarctica.  There was an article and photo about it in the July/August 1996 “Reminisce” magazine, pp. 39-40.
    My family made our own maple syrup and sold some, and still do that now, nephews still farming the original family homestead from the very early 1800s.  Even the original house is still used!  Back when I was little, my brothers would tap 300 maple trees (which grew to hundreds more over several decades, now limited numbers again) for sap to be boiled down to syrup, so sugar rationing during World War II was not a problem for us.  We trudged through deep snow in the woods each spring to help. 
    My brothers also cut ice off the ponds in the winter, stacking and packing it in sawdust in the icehouse on the back side of the barn.  Ice was cut from farm to farm the same way summer crops were harvested - by harvesting bees of many farmers working together.  It doesn’t seem like ponds freeze over long enough or thick enough to do this now.  That ice sure helped make my mother’s delicious ice cream – I think hers was the best at the ice cream socials!"
    My Mom shared that growing up in the Great Depression you had to make your own fun.  She and a few sibs took their Little Red Wagon out by the road to pick up the grass mown by the highway dept. They’d pile the wagon high, and pull it back to the barn. Mind you, this was in the days of real horsepower.  So, imitating how their dad and older brothers put hay up into the mow with the huge hayforks on rope pulleys with the horses doing the work (as my mother, and other young sibs, walked the horses back and forth repeatedly), she and her sibs took ice tongs and smaller ropes, slinging the rope up over and above the cow stanchions.  With kids on each side, the ice tongs held bits of hay as the kids on the other side lugged on the rope to pull the hay up and over, and down into the feeding trough for the cows!  Now that’s imagination!  Reminds me how I used to milk cows when I was 4-5.  In the barn with my dad as he milked in Marion, NY, I stood on a bale of hay, moving an old teakettle along on the road-side wall ledge, and stop to “milk a cow” every few inches! 
    There are so many memories my mother has shared of her family who she treasured. She greatly appreciated my extensive genealogy research and documentation of every line in her ancestry back to the 1630s New Netherlands Dutch, English, and French, the 1710 German/Swiss Palatines (Tillapaugh came from the Swiss Dallenbach, each of her parents descending from two brothers in one particular German line), 1720ish New England Scots-Irish.  She was proud my work was accepted for publication in three research delineation articles on her Hutton and McNeill ancestry in the New York Genealogical and Biographical Record. 
    My mother's father was a jack-of-all trades, not just a farmer, but a man before his time, passing away too young, when she was only 16.  I learned from my Mom that it was from him I had inherited green eyes.  He built a top-quality registered Holstein herd with Canadian Holstein-Friesian bulls before most other farmers.  I remember seeing bulls as a kid in their pens as I peered between cracks in their wooden stalls.  Besides a dairy herd and chickens, he raised pigs, and sold extra hay. He took community responsibility seriously as Carlisle town highway superintendent, Carlisle school superintendent, Justice of the Peace, and Cobleskill school board member and president. A highly respected man of the community was my Grandpa Leo, as well as Grandma Laura.
    Photo Credit: Professional photo taken in 1910 of Hutton Family Reunion, Cemetery Road, Carlisle, NY, original farmhouse built in early 1800s, where my Tillapaugh cousins continue to farm today.
     
  24. Linda Roorda

    A Friend

    By Linda Roorda,

    There is something truly special about the love of a friend… something to treasure and be thankful for!  The bond that develops is hard to break… especially when tested by time and circumstances in all of life’s ups and downs. 
    A friend shows empathy and genuine concern for another’s well being.  A friend understands the other’s need of a quiet respite for a time when life comes hard against them.  A friend reaches out in those difficult times to say, “I’m here… whenever you need me.  I won’t interfere… just know that I’m here for you.  I love you, and support you with my thoughts and my prayers.”  A friend once told me when we were both going through extensive health issues, “Now you’ll learn who your true friends are,” and she was so right.
    A friend shares your joy, while you share a gladness of heart when they are blessed, even during times of your own hardship.  Encouragement flows from one heart to another and back again for the endeavors you each pursue… strengthening the bond between both, sharing peace, joy and contentment. 
    A friend speaks truth to settle disputes.  A friend does not begrudge another their needs.  A friend does not mock, lie, retaliate, or deceive for personal gain.  A friend is willing to apologize, recognizing their own failings.  A friend forgives, yet discerns with God’s wisdom when the relationship is abusive.  And in forgiving, with or without apologies from the other, establishes boundaries of responsibility and accountability with honesty… for there are times when a relationship is detrimental and one must walk away, even when no one else understands, allowing God to work His healing.  He will give you strength and courage… for trust and respect are earned and maintained within a healthy and stable relationship, bringing honor to God.
    A friend listens with a servant’s heart… not for what they can get or take, but for what they can offer from their heart… whether with contemplative quiet or words of wisdom... without expecting anything in return.  Which all reminds me of a good marriage when you each give 100%. Needless to say, we all have times when we give less to our spouse, or to a friend.  But we don’t stay there.  We discuss and overcome what has upset us, knocked us down, and we apologize, forgive, and move forward with 100% once again.  With accountability, and that kind of trust and giving, we exhibit God’s love as He intended.
    And dear are the friends who, on getting together even infrequently, love each other enough to pick right back up where they left off as if there had been no time or distance between their meetings.  As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.”
    Such a friend is a blessing from God… someone who understands your heart… who complements what you already have or perhaps are lacking… who is able to wisely point out where you may be in the wrong… who can share in your joy… who can simply and quietly be there when your heart is breaking… who can give loving support to help accomplish a task when your skills might be limited… who will gladly come alongside with no expectation of repayment or recognition in any manner for a good deed… being someone who simply loves the other just for who they are.
    And so, we give a heartfelt “Thank you” to each of our dear friends who have stood by us, and supported us, through the numerous life challenges we have faced over the years. Such a friend… a spouse… can be so like our Lord… the One who blesses our heart with abundant love… who comes alongside, gently calling us away from life’s harms… who loves at all times… and who lays down His life to cover our sins… as we seek Him for all of our needs.  A friend like no other…
    A Friend
    Linda A. Roorda
    A friend reaches out to touch your soul
    As you share a love and a bond that twines
    From the time you meet you’re drawn in close
    You want to know more about this new friend.
    ~
    A friend is one who will ever be near
    Ready with kind words and a caring heart
    A friend will share the depths of your soul
    Midst tears that flow and the days of joy.
    ~
    A friend is waiting with arms held out
    To listen with care and understanding
    To hold you tight when life overwhelms
    To never let go no matter the trial.
    ~
    A friend gently holds your heart with joy
    Like a rose in bloom with beauty fragile,
    Yet strongly stands to face stormy days
    That test the strength of ties that bind.
    ~
    A friend is there to listen at length
    When anger erupts like a storm at sea
    And days arrive with hurts that steal joy
    To clear the heart of issues that strain.
    ~
    A friend will wait no matter how long
    To regain the lapse when life interrupts
    As you pick back up where you both left off
    Not missing a beat with hearts in tune.
    ~
    A friend’s precious words lift up your heart
    To heal the wounds and cover the scars
    With guiding wisdom extended in love
    To cheer the soul and renew the joy.
    ~
    A friend brings peace for a troubled soul
    To share quiet time and ease tensions tight
    To calm the fears and carry the loss
    And help you walk a difficult path.
    ~
    A friend shares the joy that floods your soul
    The blessings of life in showers rich
    Those unannounced and those from long hope
    As you give sweet praise for heaven’s ways.
    ~
    A friend will give their life as a gift
    To sacrifice self for the gain of all
    A friend clings to hope that the best in you
    Will still shine bright when all else seems lost.
    ~
    A friend there is no greater than this
    Than the Lord above with His love divine
    He holds out his hands, draws us to His side
    And blesses our hearts with joy from a friend.
    ~~
  25. Linda Roorda
    In researching your ancestors, you will hit brick walls – guaranteed!  When you do, think about who the most recent known ancestor was.  Remember that we discussed previously how the Dutch used a specific naming pattern.  Each child was named after the grandparents, alternating back and forth to include each of the child’s grandparents, great-grandparents, then aunts, uncles and parents, the parents' names, etc.  Other ethnic groups, including the Germans, often used a similar pattern, but did not follow it as consistently.  By searching census records of the community where a particular family was known to live, I found the probable paternal grandfather of a friend’s ancestor.  It appeared her ancestor’s middle name was that of the probable grandfather, thus creating a crack in her brick wall.
    Often, names changed spelling over time depending on the speller’s knowledge, or were changed to reflect the pronunciation.  Your surname today may not be how it began a few centuries ago.  My maternal family name of Tillapaugh began as the Swiss Dällenbach, being changed in the early 1800s among several lines, including the usual Dillenbeck/Dillenbach, etc.  Another example is the German Jung, pronounced and often Americanized as Young.  From the 1600s New Amsterdam, my Dutch VanKouwenhoven morphed into Conover.  My French DeGarmeaux from the Albany area became DeGarmo, while my German Richtmyer became Rightmyer in other lines. 
    Another example of surname change is found in my Revolutionary War families.  The original Swiss Dübendorffer became Diefendorf after arrival here in the 1730s.  My ancestor Georg Jacob Diefendorf remained loyal to the crown during the Revolutionary War.  However, his son, a staunch patriot, took his mother’s surname (his own middle name) as his new surname, becoming John Diefendorf Hendree, to disassociate himself from his father.
    Paying close attention to details helped me find the marriage date for my ancestors Christina Dingman and Jacob Kniskern.  Sorting book by book in one row of the genealogy section of the Steele Library in Elmira, I saw a tiny church book for Montgomery County, New York.  This is a typed transcription of original handwritten church records.  Having seen these church records online, I knew exactly what I was holding.  Searching page by page, I saw the name of “Conescarn.”  Suddenly, I realized that I was looking at the phonetic spelling for the old pronunciation of Kniskern; now the “K” is silent.  I’d discovered what no one else had recognized before - my great-great-grandparents’ marriage date of October 17, 1840!
    My family's Kniskern name began as Genesgern in church books from the 1500s in Germany.  It is one of the oldest documented pedigrees of any New York 1709/10 Palatine emigrant according to the author Henry Z. Jones, Jr. in his personal email to me.  See his two-volume set “The Palatine Families of New York 1710” which I own with invaluable family data.  Mr. Jones and his assistants went to Germany and systematically searched records in every town and old church to document as many Palatine-region emigrant families as possible to provide solid documentation for today’s researchers.
    When researching old families, it is also helpful to know that Sr. or Jr. and Elder or Younger do not necessarily indicate father and son as it does today.  Often, this title was used to differentiate between extended relatives or unrelated men within the same community who happened to have the same name.  With the old naming pattern, it was not uncommon to find “umpteen” men and boys by the same name in town and church records.  Without the title or other differentiation, it can be difficult to place them correctly in their family of origin, though key is noting the birth parents and baptismal sponsors.
    Census takers frequently wrote a surname based on their own spelling ability, which, I discovered, was often quite atrocious!  Be flexible.  As you search records, try various spellings as names were often written as they sounded.  That fact alone can make all the difference in finding your ancestor.  Even my McNeill name, consistently signed by the oldest family members with two “l”s, was spelled variously on census records as McNial (likely written as pronounced by the old accent), McNeal, McNiel or simply McNeil (without the second “l”).  Several years ago, I transcribed the online 1810 census for Carlisle, Schoharie County, New York and posted it on the county genweb page.  Some names were very misspelled; but, being familiar with many of Carlisle’s families from research, I understood the intended names and put them in parentheses.
    However, in hitting your brick wall, do not jump hastily into accepting published genealogies.  If there is evidentiary proof with solid documentation (like I provided for my published genealogies in footnotes) from reputable journals or well-documented books or actual hard proof in family Bibles and church records, then you should be able to accept them.  But, again, beware!  I found false leads, fake ties, and erroneous data which I proved wrong with personal old-fashioned research, part of my published thesis.  It pays to put in the extra effort to prove your data.
    I also want to stress that I do not readily accept claims of family ties to famous historical folks, Mayflower ancestors, or royalty - nor should you.  Maybe you truly are connected, and know that I'm excited for you! But I want to see sound documentation, preferably family Bible records, church records, baptismal, marriage and death records, or cemetery records for every generation backward as possible. Also know that most well-documented earliest generations in America begin in the 17th or 18th centuries.  Viable records previous to those centuries in Europe are not always available.
    Since Ancestry.com has records from Britain, Ireland, Wales and several European countries, it is a valuable subscription resource.  You can also hire one of their professionals should you feel the need for their assistance.  A general search online for records from a particular nation may also be helpful as I found a reputable website with documented birth and marriage records from the Netherlands for my grandmother’s lineage.  I purchased the book on my paternal ancestry documented by a woman married to my direct cousin; she just happened to work in the genealogy division of The Hague, and we are now friends.  Though her work can definitively trace my paternal ancestry only to the early 18th century, I’m satisfied.  And I was amazed to see the book held the photo of a Dutch constable, a brother of my great-grandfather, who looked uncannily like my Dad, even to how he stood!! 
    Some of your best resources can be found in books containing transcripts of original documents and/or in legitimate family records placed at historical or genealogical societies.  Unless you know that what you hold in your hands is truly legit, do like I did to prove my lineage beyond a doubt – tackle the hard work yourself to prove every ancestor.  Yes, it’s time consuming and takes years, but the end result is truly worth the effort! 
    May I also suggest that once your research is done, give a copy to the local historical society where your family originated. I donated a copy of my 600+ page manuscript on my mother's family to the Schoharie County Historical Society at the Old Stone Fort in Schoharie, and eventually plan to donate all my numerous file folders full of research and correspondence (whatever my family does not wish to keep). By doing so, you will aid future generations of seekers.
    Again, many genealogies were written in the past with ties to royalty and early American Mayflower ancestors which have since been proven false.  A number of resources regarding what to look out for are available at the following websites:
    LDS Family Search “Fraudulent Genealogies.”
    Genealogy.com’s “Fraudulent Lineages” by Nicole Wingate.
    Genealogy’s Star blog:  Genealogy as a Fraud.
    Tips on accuracy of research in “Bogus Genealogies” by George C. Morgan.
    COMING NEXT:  County Historical and Genealogical Society holdings.
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