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!