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.