Grandma's Granny's Family Album

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 ...

This is the saddest thing I have ever read. "They tied people up and beat them, even hanged them, as they pressed them for money.  If the people didn't have any, they smashed the windows, ovens, and everything in the houses, or took with them everything that the farmers hadn't been able to hide."  The trauma these poor people endured!  And it went on  for 30 years .  I think what added to the trauma was that it came fairly suddenly and had no rhyme or reason.  You didn't know which people were enemies, and it would seem to stop and get better only to suddenly start all over again.  How many times would your house burn down before you stop trying to rebuild it? We're fairly used to seeing lists of dead people: the Vietnam War Memorial, Officers Down Memorial Page, monuments to hometown sons killed in the World Wars.  But the 30 Years' War was so devastating, when it was over, they published the names of people who  survived. I have been "readi...

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 UEL after your name and on your license plate. The town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, where we visited my grandfather's family most summers, was the setting for my first genealogy discoveries. (see Acker Pedigree Chart and Acker Family Descendant Charts) Shelburne has a tourism economy based on the town's founding in 1783.  At the entrance, a large sign flanked by a redcoated colonist, ripe for photo ops, proclaims that Shelburne was founded by United Empire Loyalists.  After one childhood photo op, I asked my mother's cousin Doris if our family were UE Loyalists.  She said she didn't know.  At age 8, I decided that someday when I was old enough, I would find out. me with my mother's cous...