It's Been a While

In January 2017 I wrote a draft of a post entitled "Takin' a Rest".  It was about the events of the year 2016. October of 2016 had been wonderful. I made a road trip to upstate New York that included a presentation of my vintage photos at Hartwick College, visiting cemeteries and finding the graves of Samuel & Elizabeth Jones, meeting with historians and librarians and spending time in Roscoe.In January 2017 I decided to take a rest. I was worn out from researching ancestry, and when you're focusing on American history and black people, the rolling hills, weathered barns and shacks, even antique shops kinda lose their quaint appeal. And not just in the south; in upstate New York I spotted more than one rebel flag. Trump supporters!  

But I've continued to explore my mother's side of the family, particularly her father's branch - the Wheatley's. Turns out the Wheatley's were slaves in Kentucky. Husband and I made a road trip in 2018 to Chicago to visit my 98 year old uncle George Wheatley, with stops in towns along the route from Greenup KY, across the Ohio River into freedom, north to Westerville OH where the Hanby House Museum now stands. The Hanby family were abolitionists, their house a station on the Underground RR.  At the museum they showed me a Declaration of Emancipation that was part of the plantation owner's will for Mary King. She is my 3rd great grandmother who was married to Harrison Wheatley! The Hanby house became somewhat ramshackled and was a boardinghouse owned by a black man for many years.  According to records Henry Wheatley Sr. (son of Harrison and Mary) lived in that house for a time before settling in the town of Westerville.  


  

1913 Class Photo, Roscoe NY

Cemeteries

Evergreen Hill Cemetery, Unadilla NY

Samuel Jones

Elizabeth Jones 

Prospect Hill Cemetery, Sidney NY

John L Dudley

      Also buried here:  

William Street (1830-1908) and Lorena F Rogers Dudley (1864-1913)

Main Street Then & Now

Railroad Avenue Then & Now

View from Railroad Avenue looking across the tracks: 

See brick building left.
Aunt Hannah w/ John Dudley Jr.

Me standing beside that
brick building.

They've turned what was once Railroad Avenue into a small park that commemorates where the old Roscoe House hotel once stood. I think it was torn down before I was born but my brother remembers it. The Dudley's house was next to the hotel. A few houses down was the Jones' house where my great grandparents and grandmother Elizabeth lived and where my father came to live as a teen.  The park is now a shady stretch that runs alongside of the Willowemoc River.  I walked and then stood where I thought the end of the Jones' property had been. The view of the Willowemoc had not changed.

The view from the Dudley's back yard.  You can
see the back of the main building and an extension
of the Roscoe House.
Jean and Claude Newkirk. Leona Dudley's kids.

View of Willowemoc River from the end of Dudley & Jones' property:

Iron bridge has been replaced
with a cement roadway.

Somebody's Ancestor

2016 has been such a year of historic discovery and rediscovery for me - learning so much,  visiting and revisiting historic places, finding relics and remnants of the lives my ancestors lived in upstate New York as far back as 1831. And whenever I was visiting where they lived, where they grew up and where they died, I always took a moment to try and imagine them or someone in their family standing with me - staring at the grave of a father who had just died in 1892, cleaning railroad cars emptied of city folk on their way to Catskill resorts in the 1920s, the lone colored girl sitting for a class photo in front of the shingled school building in 1914, or that popular teenager on the H.S. football team walking with a jaunty step across the railroad tracks towards the athletic fields in 1940.  

Julia Ardell Jones (center), daughter of Samuel Jones

Willard Dudley

And for some reason, what just came to my mind was an image from the future - when my descendants are rummaging through mementos or relics of my life and how they casually note that great grandma Linda Williams was alive when Barack Obama was elected president and also the other one, the outlandish casino owner Donald Trump.  A long time ago. Things were so backward then. They'll have no idea how intensely their great grandma admired the former and how traumatic it was for her when eight years later the American people, including members of the KKK voted for the latter.    




2016 started out as a great year but ended on a bad note.  But it's all part of history.  We've been through worse and hopefully we'll survive this.

Sharing My Stories

When I was planning this "roots trip", I didn't see it as a production - with themes, chapters, a finale. But looking back at my 13 days in NYS, it almost looks as if it followed a script.  Throughout, I visited  places of the past: my past, my father's past, my ancestors' past. I was able to see parts of Roscoe that jogged my memory of my visits there as a child.  Parts that my father captured with his Kodak box camera - that still remain; the high school and the athletic fields, an old bank, the Presbyterian Church. I look at his photos differently now.

Stewart Ave (Main St)
 Roscoe NY 1941
Photo by Charles Williams

Then my husband and I traveled north, along the Susquehanna River - a major route of the Underground Railroad, and saw the towns where Samuel & Elizabeth Jones and Loren & Mary Rogers had settled and raised their families - Unadilla and Sidney. We saw places that played significant roles in abolishing slavery such as the Empire House in Gilbertsville NY. We visited beautiful hilltop cemeteries, talked with helpful cemetery volunteers and local historians and visited my family's graves.

And then we, along with our two daughters who joined us, attended a 2-day conference held at Hartwick College in Oneonta NY given by the USCT Institute (US Colored Troops Institute for Local History and Family Research).  I gave a presentation sharing my photo collection and my family's story, listened and learned from other presenters and participants, and was one of 6 Freedmen Descendants to be awarded a "gold medal" for family research.  Quite a finale!

The conference was great. Met many nice people, learned a lot and felt very much "a part of the family".  Thank you Mr. Matthews!