Grandma's Granny's Family Album

  As I wrote this, I thought of the quilt made by my great-grandmother. She died before I was born, yet I feel her love when I lie under its warmth. In Chapters One thru Seven, we met Sarah Rushton walking her land grant in 1827 Westchester, Nova Scotia with her daughter Elizabeth and grandchildren. Sarah, husband Jeremiah, and family were exiled from New York as Loyalists after the Revolution. Promised land by the British, they boarded a ship, then walked for days, hauling their belongings. Fretting over her husband’s plan to move to Upper Canada, Elizabeth asked, “How will I have a baby in the wilderness?” Sarah explained she’d avoided pregnancy as a refugee. The Rushtons labored to meet the terms of the land grant, as shown in a chart detailing women’s work. Sarah and Jeremiah dealt in complex transactions of land, including legal action for debt.

  Our place in time. In the US, siding with England in the Revolutionary War makes you at best a loser and at worst a traitor. But in Canada, being a United Empire Loyalist is a badge of honor. If you can prove your descent from one, you can apply for a lineage society, earning the right to put UE after your name and on your license plate. Our place in time.   Our spot, in history. The town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, where we visited my grandfather's family most summers, was the setting for my first genealogy discoveries.

How many Johns do you know?  Probably a lot, since it is the most popular first name in the US today, with 5,298,362 males (total, not new babies).   How many ancestors do we have named John?  ( 🙋 Quiz - answer at bottom).  

I assumed my great-grandparents Gertrude and Theodore Zoeller were partners.  His life was remarkably successful.  Arriving in 1845 as a teenage farmer responsible for 2 younger siblings shell-shocked by the recent death of their mother onboard ship, he became a prosperous business owner and politician.  From at least 1857 to 1859, he rented a store for his cabinet-making.  It appears he specialized in elaborate furniture of mahogany carved with deer and fruit, representing the plenty that newly rich immigrants could afford.  Theodore owned a $100 watch ($2000 in today's money) and a $200 piano - during the Civil War when the government needed money, they got $3 by taxing both. $3 could pay for a far sadder thing than piano taxes - an infant's grave at Calvary Catholic Cemetery. In Queens, Calvary was an easy ferry ride away from the 17th Ward of Manhattan, where most immigrants lived.  A contemporary wrote that funeral processions were constantly going up ...

 I wrote this history of her family for my mother-in-law in 2020.  Eva May Sorenson was her mother, and Maud Van Wart was her grandmother. Van Wart – Schaffner Family History On April 25, 1861, an eager and enthusiastic Edwin Forrest Van Wart, only 20, either very patriotic or very bored with his cap cutting job, answered President Lincoln’s call to arms to suppress the rebellion.  New York was required to send 17 regiments of men who appeared to be over 18 and under 45 and in physical strength and vigor.   To circumvent this problem, Edwin claimed to be 21, and his father, William Van Wart, claimed to be 40 instead of 44 when he signed up to join his son on muster day, May 9, at Fort Schuyler, for 2 years.  As a police officer, William must have thought he was in perfect shape to be a soldier. Colonel Abram Duryee had been asked to raise the regiment.  He must have given stirring rousing speeches because he raised the regiment in less than a week.  Ed...

Have you heard of the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow? I was looking at church records from Philipsburgh Manor in Westchester County, NY, since that is where our ancestor John B. Acker said he was from ( see Parts 1 and 2 in Acker Series, see Acker Pedigree Chart ).  The records are partially written in Dutch, which is actually pretty easy to read, once you know that  Kind  means child and gedoopt means baptized. The records collection is called both  Record Book of the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow and  Dutch Reformed Church Records of First Tarrytown Church .  I remembered that the Headless Horseman chased Ichabod Crane thru the graveyard of the Old Dutch Church, so I looked to see how many Dutch churches there were in Westchester County, and how far Philipsburgh, Tarrytown, and Sleepy Hollow are from each other. The Headless Horseman is good for the tourist trade Come to find out, there is only one Dutch church, and it is old, having been built ...