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!  
 

What a Trip!

         We saw upstate New York at its finest.  Ten days of great weather and gorgeous autumn color.  Beautiful lakes, rolling hills, farmland. No tacky billboards shouting Adult toys! Big Ed's Fireworks! Find Jesus! like some other interstate highways I know of.  And dear little Roscoe, unchanged, a little shabbier, but hey, they've got a micro-brewery now.  AND, where there used to be a string of houses including my father/grandmother/gr. grandparents' house - on Railroad Avenue….

The house on Railroad Avenue

there's a little park! With a plaque marking the beginning of the street where the famous Roscoe Hotel used to be (before my time).  I walked a certain distance under a canopy of trees beside the Willowemoc River, pass where the Dudley house once stood, a little further to where I felt the Jones' house had been.  I looked down at the bank of the river and there were the railroad ties that my gr. grandfather had installed to form a kind of dock! The view from that spot was just as my dad had photographed it with his little Kodak box camera when he was a kid and just as I remembered it from decades ago.  So to me, that little park was like a memorial to my Roscoe ancestors!             As soon as we arrived in Roscoe, hubby and I paid a visit to the Roscoe Free Public Library where I had made an appointment to meet with the librarian/local historian. We had a blast. Learned a lot about the area's history (thank you Joyce!), looked at and exchanged copies of old photos and vintage post cards. I  shared photos from my collection that I had brought, noting surnames written on the backs that the librarians recognized:  Sprague! They owned the department store!  Mootz! Barnes!  I went to school with a Barnes!  Dudley! My mother spoke highly of the Dudleys! 
       And thank you Alice! for running home and returning with this amazing photograph:
                     

It's a 1914 photo of the students who attended Roscoe's single building schoolhouse. I immediately recognized my grandmother, Elizabeth Jones!  There she was, seated 3rd from the right. I saw her face, the strong cheekbones that we were always told reflected her Indian heritage. It's a beautiful picture.  And someone had written the identities of all the students!!!  Probably at a class reunion years later.  

     

     We also visited nearby Liberty and Livingston Manor, trekked through five cemeteries - in Roscoe, Sidney & Unadilla,  searched for ancestors' graves, found a few.  Talked to local historians and average folks who knew a lot about history and some who were just plain fun to talk to.  A lovely couple who owned an antique store in Gilbertsville told us to be sure and go to the small church just up the street.  Just walk on in, go down a hall, you'll see a closet door on the left. That closet had a secret passageway which led to a shelter for escaping slaves on their way to Canada. We went inside - this on one of the very few gray, drizzly days.  Looked around, didn't find the closet but this was the place, somewhere beyond those ceiling beams perhaps, where frightened people sweated, held their breath in the dark, and hoped. 

The Smiths of Gilbertsville

Mrs. Hannah Smith 
W. R. Smith, Photographer
Gilbertsville NY

Carrie Smith Died 1881
W. R. Smith, Artist
Gilbertsville NY

I find these two portraits intriquing. They are both well-worn and handled and both identified on the back, which leads me to believe that whoever wrote the messages in soft pencil, was very fond of them.  The photos provided me with the surname Smith, which also appears as the photographer, and the town of Gilbertsville NY, so I started doing a little digging. By locating graves and accompanying bios and reading past issues of the USCTI Civil War Digest,  I was able to make some possible connections, starting with the the earliest:

I.  In 1816, James and Hannah Carpenter sold land (part of the Hannah Smith Tract of Burlington Township NY) to a black man named Cato Freeman and his wife Amelia. Cato Freeman had fought in the American Revolution.  This may or may not relate to Hannah Smith in the photo.

II.  There was, however a Hannah Lucas Smith b. 1805 d. Feb 18, 1879, Chenango, NY  

- spouse: Rufus C. Smith (1800-1874) 

- children:  William Randolph Smith (1832-1913), Leila Smith (1846-1848)

- burial:  Sunset Hill Cemetery, Guilford, Chenango, NY

III.  William Randolph Smith (1832-1913), son of Hannah & Rufus Smith

- in 1860 married 1st wife : Mary Jane Coye Smith of Butternut NY

- their child:  Carrie S. Smith (1861-1881) age of death 20   

- cemetery: Oak Hill Cemetery Geneva, Kane Cty IL              

More info: b. Norfolk CT, son of Rufus & Hannah (Lucas) Smith and grandson of Corkins Smith - a veteran of the Revolutionary War.  Raised, schooled in NYS.  Mastered the jewelers trade, moved to Geneva IL, was a merchant  (no mention of photography or art).  He remarried and moved to FL.  When he died, he left 2 nieces in NY.  His Siblings:  Rufus C. Smith  (Jr?) (1840-1911), Leila Smith (1846-1848) and half sibling Marvin A. Smith (1844-1910).  

IV.  Carrie S. Smith b. 1861 Gilbertsville NY d. 1881 Elgin IL  Cemetery: Oak Hill Cemetery, Geneva IL  Per FindaGrave bio, which cites her obituary in The Elgin Advocate, Saturday June 25, 1881: Carrie moved to Elgin IL the last year of her life to be with her father and step mother: Dema Reser Smith.  Cause of death: "general debility" with chronic diarrhea, indigestion etc.

Conclusion:  I still don't know if W.R. Smith the photographer was related to Hannah or William Randolph or Carrie.  But maybe back then photography was taken up as a vocation, not a trade and maybe before he became a jeweler, he ran a photography studio in Gilbertsville NY where his daughter Carrie and her grandmother/his mother Hannah Smith (from the photo) lived. 

Aunt Essie's Gift

Aunt Essie

Growing up, we referred to New York relatives as if they were clans down 'yonder. In Roscoe we'd visit the Dudleys.  In Queens, we had cook-outs with the Shippens.  My father being an only child, the Shippens represented his only NYS family. They consisted of Aunt Essie (born Esther Dudley (1894, Sidney NY) and her 2 daughters Fran and Betty. The photo above shows Aunt Essie exactly as I remember her.  At picnics or in back yards, her daughters would gently set her up comfortably in a lawn chair where she'd reign in the shade as resident matriarch, with a directness I found a little intimidating.  When I look at that photo above, I can actually hear her distinctive raspy voice. 

Essie's mother, Lorena.

The reason I am honoring Aunt Essie on this genealogical journey of mine, is that I vaguely remember my mother holding a shoe box full of photos and saying that Aunt Essie had given it to us. Then I promptly forgot about the photos until 50 years later.  

AND the person who passed the photos down to Essie was probably her mother Lorena, as women usually are the keepers of family artifacts. Lorena Rogers married a Dudley which explains why there are so many photos of Dudley's in the collection.  Since Lorena and my great grandmother Helen Rogers Jones were sisters…well let's just say  thanks to my great aunt Lorena Rogers Dudley and Essie for this gift of photographs and family history.  

Autumn Trip

 It's that point in the summer season when the tomato plants are lookin' dried and droopy and there's something in the air that says winter's not so far away.  A little depressing.  Did I enjoy the summer enough?  We never got to the beach! 

But there's something I can look forward to:  My Trip to Roscoe in the Fall!!!

***If you've got grandparents or great grandparents who lived in Roscoe, see Pages on the left and click on Roscoe Names &Faces.***

Toronto, Niagara Falls, the Finger Lakes, Ithaca, Sidney, Unadilla, Cooperstown, Hartwick College, Oneonta, Liberty, Hurleyville and Roscoe….. here I come!!

Going off to War

Charles B Williams, Roscoe NY

Unknown friends, probably from Roscoe NY

Dick Winkler from Roscoe NY

Shortly after graduating from Roscoe H.S., my dad and his friends signed up to fight in the second World War.  An interesting story, and one that says a lot about my father's idyllic yet sheltered childhood, is when the newly enlisted Marines from Roscoe went to Washington D.C., proudly dressed in their uniforms, one hotel would not allow my father, a black man, to have a room there.  As my father told it, his friends angrily turned and walked out of that hotel, refusing to stay there without him.  That incident was probably the first time any of those boys had ever witnessed, and in my father's case, experienced racism.  Ironically, because of the segregated military system, my father became a member of the U.S. Colored Troops.  He fought on the island of Guam in the Pacific and spoke very little of his time in the war.

Possibly the son of Mr. & Mrs. Marks,
Roscoe NY

Marton Miller,
Roscoe, NY 

Helen Jones & the Rogers Clan

 Both of my father's grandparents were born in Unadilla NY.   About his grandfather after whom he was named, my dad would say, with touch of admiration: In Roscoe, he was known as Good-time Charley.  I guess opposites attract because Helen Rogers Jones was anything but outgoing.  My father told us that his grandmother was a very shy woman; that she never went "to town", even though in photos of Roscoe you can see that Main Street was directly beyond the RR tracks from their house! When I asked How did she go to the grocery store?! my father said either he'd go pick up the groceries or she'd have them delivered.


     The only identified photos of Helen are the tiny one above which shows her with her sister Lovina and the one of a woman sitting outside. In neither photo does she  look at the camera.  Obviously she might have hated having her picture taken.  Yet based on the many photos addressed Dear Aunt Helen and the letters written to her, I think she was a favorite aunt and sister. And I know to my father, she was a favorite grandmother.

Mary Rogers

Helen's mother, Mary Rogers was born in 1838 in Madison NY (at least that's what she told the 1865 census taker).  In 1865 Mary is living with her husband Loren and 3 small children in Norwich NY.  Her name is barely legible on the census form.  It looks like Malina. In the identified photo her right hand appears to be deformed. Despite that, and despite probably being illiterate at the time,  Mary managed to write her own name on the census form. I'll bet she insisted on it!  I admire this photo so much because despite the fact that she was born about 25 years before the Civil War,  raised 8 children, worked hard and was partially disabled and illiterate, at an advanced age she sat proudly in a photography studio to have her picture taken. 

I have NO photos of Mary's husband/Helen's father: Loren Rogers, a marble polisher born in 1825 in Chenango NY.  He is listed as mulatto in the 1880 census. A surprise to me. As I was curious about his roots, I came across a book online: The History of Otsego County NY 1740 - 1878 published in 1878 about the early settlers who came from New England to what was then called "the western wilds of New York State" including one Samuel Rogers who settled in this locality (Unadilla) and raised a  large and respectable family.  The Rogers family included sons and grandsons named Gustavus, Sherman, Charles and Jabez. Could my gr. gr. grandfather have been related to the respectable white Rogers family that helped settle Unadilla?   Ya never know!

The family Loren and Mary Rogers raised  in Norwich NY appears to have been close-knit and well established. I have a letter written to Helen from her sister Lovina who had moved to Arizona with her husband Walton Lewis for health reasons. In the letter they discuss how they are continuing to chip in $$ to pay funeral costs for a brother and their father who had died.

Helen's nephew
Charley West (back row rt.)

In later years, the Rogers family was particularly proud of Helen's sister Hannah's son, Charley West who appears to have gone to college. On the back of photo is written Cooper '13.  I've searched and searched for the school that the photo refers to.    This one of my favorite photographs.  Man, was he good-lookin'!

Hannah Rogers West

People of Conscience?

Admittedly, my knowledge of African-American history had not increased much since the late 60s when my high school history teacher, Mr. Klein gave a mini-lecture for this new thing called Black History Day. I remember his words felt scripted, his tone overblown and condescending:  And so, boys and girls, George, Washington, Carver… invented peanut butter!  Isn't that great?  He kept smiling at me, the only black kid in the class (we weren't colored anymore), and I remember slouching way down in my seat and giving him my best sullen glare.

So, as I continue researching my family's history, I'm learning a lot about African-American history in general.  I've read about entire communities of freed men and women in upstate NY in the 1800s, I learned that the Underground RR was very extensive, with safe havens existing in places like Xenia,Ohio; Unadilla NY, Redwing, Minnesota and in the western states. And I've read about the abolitionist movement which was a world-wide effort that began long before the Civil War. There was the World Anti-Slavery Society which held its convention in London in1840 with delegates from the American Anti-Slavery Society in attendance, there were Quakers and Suffragettes working to end slavery and there were regular  people who, though not in any way political or radical, were people of conscience, including all the average folks who provided safe havens for black people heading toward freedom.  

All this to say, there were many white people, probably good church-goin' folks, who took risks and helped resettle new arrivals from the south, helped them get jobs, schooling and start families.  People who treated fellow human beings with dignity, respect and in some obvious cases, great affection. 

So when I look at those vintage European American faces in my collection, especially those with handwritten messages on the back, I wonder if I'm seeing the face of people of conscience.

I'm a Freedman Descendant!

I don't have a foreign accent, yet I am often asked where I am from. Because of my face, with its ambiguous ethnicity, people often assume I'm from some other country, or at least one generation away from Ellis Island or South-of-the-Border, when actually my ancestors have been in America for many generations; some, like Libbie Jones' family, were here long before the Mayflower!

Gr. gr. grandmother 
Libbie Jones: according
to family stories, she was
from an Indian reservation
near the Canadian border.

So when I think about going back to the old country, it's not to Italy or Nigeria or even Germany (where the most recent immigrant, my mother's grandmother, was from.)

Emma Keifer, from Germany

Since I started this geneological journey, the three places I've planned to visit were:  Chicago, Illinois,  Henderson, N. Carolina and upstate New York.    And the plan for the Summer of 2016 was to check out cemeteries, historical societies and courthouses in places like Unadilla and Norwich. And of course dear old Roscoe.


Well, a funny thing happened in January of this year.  I was trying to find information about my gr. gr. grandfather - the guy with the Civil War badge in the photo that has been in my family forever.

So I Googled Samuel Jones and up popped a photo of hia gravestone!!   It was part of an article in the December 2015 issue of the USCT Civil War Digest, out of Hartwick College in Oneonta NY.  And the entire article about him!!   And that's how I discovered the USCT (United States Colored Troops Institute)/American Society of Freedmen Descendants. I contacted the director of the institute, we stayed in touch, sharing photos and information about Samuel Jones; he sent me back issues of the magazine and I learned tons of information about the Underground RR and upstate NY's role in the abolitionist movement.  I was inducted into the Society of Freedmen Descendants and invited to attend the institute's October conference!

So… instead of a summer trip to NY, we 're going on my "roots road trip" in the!!   I'm super excited.  Got my Power Point presentation ready.  Gonna share my photo collection.  Going to Niagara Falls (never been), then rent a car and head south east to the Finger Lakes (never been), then to Roscoe where I'm going to meet with a local historian with the Sullivan County Historical Society, then to Oneonta for the conference.

I am super excited!!!!

Growing Up in Roscoe, New York

This cute little boy is my father, Charles Barry Williams.

He was born 1924 in New York City but spent his school years living with his grandparents Charles & Helen Jones in Roscoe NY.  They lived in a 2-story shingled house on Railroad Avenue.

            Among Catskills area high school football teams, he was known as "that fast colored guy from Roscoe".

Roscoe HS 1941

Written on back by Charlie Williams:  Standing l-r: Alex DiNick, Ashley Stadel, Fred Bennett, Bob Bullin, Jim Bleakley, Me, Dub McGraw, Dick Read, Jerry Jones, Fred Shutts, Coach Wilbur.  Kneeling l-r: Carlton Knickerbocker (Nick), Charles Barnes, Wilmer Sipple (Sipp), Ralph "Jiggs" Charlon, Leonard Dauch (Ikey)

Roscoe Central High School
Class of 1943

A Dusty Treasure Trove

When we sold my parents' house (my father had died and we decided to bring my 88 year old mother  up to live with us), I found a shoe box on a dusty shelf in a storage closet out in the garage.  It probably had not seen the light of day since my parents had moved to Florida from New York about 30 years earlier.  After the arduous task of getting the house ready to sell (making it shine, getting rid of a lifetime of clutter, countless trips to Goodwill, etc.) we packed up the U-haul with some keepsake furnishings and we brought the shoe box to its new home. When I eventually got around to opening it, I saw that it contained old photos.  Some were familiar ones I remembered seeing when I was young, but oh, there was so much more.  In that box were snapshots of my father as a child, scenes of Roscoe NY, tintypes and dozens of portraits, called Cabinet Cards, taken in professional photography studios in places like Unadilla, Oneonta, Sydney, Elmira and Binghamton.

Samuel Jones
1826-1892

I had done a lot of research filling in my family tree, and with the box of photos, I could finally match faces to names. My great great grandfather's name was Samuel Jones.  He fought in the Civil War.  On the back of the photo above was written (in my father's handwriting): Grandpa Jones' father.

As I started going through the unidentified portraits one by one, some of the faces were so beautiful, so interesting, so full of distinction, that I felt I had been given a gift in the form of a box of dusty photos.  I felt that the people in the photos, the mystery people from the past, were asking to be, they deserved to be, connected with their future -  the present.  I'm sure they would have liked to be able to share their story, their accomplishments, their memory, with their descendants.  And I knew that there were people out there researching their roots in upstate NY who might recognize a family member.  And so I decided to start a blog as a gallery of photos with hopes that someone will recognize a face or a name or a story (as my posts relate my own family's story) and contact me.

Julian Brathwaite [sp]

Based on my family's frequent vacations spent in the Catskills and Adirondacks in the 1960s,  I had always assumed that hardly any black people lived in upstate NY.  So it was surprising to see, in these studio portraits so many people of color! Living in the Catskills so long ago!  And it was even more surprising to see that this box, this collection of photos, contained dozens of portraits and snapshots of white people. I mean, they obviously weren't related to my family so it seemed a little strange. Some are addressed to my father, his mother or his grandmother so they were obviously friends.  Friends and neighbors.  But the dozens of studio portraits of unidentified faces, black and white, will continue to baffle me.