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Gazetteers and Genealogy

People tell us “I’ve got Ancestry.  Why do I need a gazetteer of the town where my family lived?”

That’s a fair question.  We’ll use the Childs’ Gazetteer and Business Directory of Sullivan County for 1872-73, which we publish as a download as an example here.

As it turns out, we use Ancestry heavily both in our own genealogy research and in writing local history (which we also do).  Being able to hypothesize a family tree for a local history figure on short notice, and work out marriages, births, and that sort of thing on the fly is a little-recognized capability Ancestry is great for.  We’ll write another post about that soon, but this one is about the use of gazetteers in your genealogical research.

First off, gazetteers (also local directories, business directories, and that kind of thing) usually contain a few components.  Often there’s a short narrative about the locality.  We got our feet wet in genealogy in Sullivan County, in New York State, and conveniently we publish a gazetteer from there.

These volumes are notable, first, for listings of the families (usually the head of household) and the businesses in each locality, normally in alphabetic order. Here’s a sample: From any of those listings you know several things that you’re not apt to find as a hint in Ancestry. 

Also, there’s often a short article about the town or city, its history and its industries.  Frequently you’ll find a list of houses of worship.  Perhaps there will be ads for local businesses (selling ads was one way publishers of directories made their money).  You may find listings of organizations, and often lists of other things about the locality that were meaningful when the gazetteer was compiled.  You’ll almost always find the occupation of the head of household listed. And, best of all, gazetteers were normally published in non-census years, providing a good way to check where a person or family might be outside the years ending in 0.

In addition to the Childs’ Gazetteer and Business Directory of Sullivan County for 1872-73 that we use as an example, we publish several others, including:

–The Erie County, NY Directory for 1924

—Genesee County Business Directory and Gazetteer (1882).  

—Child’s Gazetteer and Business Directory for Lewis County for 1872-73 

—Port Jervis City Directory (1922)

—Child’s Gazetteer and Business Directory for Wayne County for 1867-68

—Boyd’s 1908 Street Guide for Philadelphia and Camden

—Westbrook, Maine:  Directory for 1888

—Blue Book of Newton, MA for 1910

—Worcester Directory for 1871

—Nevada, Missouri Directory for 1905

—Tax Book and Valuation of Property, Town of West Greenwich, for 1889

—White’s Peoria County Directory for 1919

—Directory of All Business and Professional Men of Ashtabula County, Ohio (1895)

In future articles we’ll discuss some other obscure material we publish that you just might find helpful in your research, and, generally, you won’t find on Ancestry, as good as it is.

 

 

 

Sullivan County, NY genealogy overview

We got our feet wet in genealogy in Sullivan County, in New York State.

That was a long, long time ago, when grandmother used to talk about the families she knew as a little girl, growing up in Neversink.  She frequently mentioned that lots of people she grew up with didn’t know where their parents had come from, or at least nobody talked about it.  In later life I began to understand why that might be.

Cross family genealogy
The genealogy of the family of Noah Cross

I learned at an early age that people in Liberty seemed to fall into two groups: those who were Jewish and those who were something else.  We were in the “something else” category, but I had friends in both groups, and we all got along to an extent that seems remarkable today, but I very early realized that our family histories were far from just alike.  

We lived in a house about a block from the tracks of the New York, Ontario & Western Railroad.  I remember when the O&W was fading away, I remember being a passenger on the last passenger run the railroad made, and I remember how empty the right of way looked when the trains were gone and the rails had been ripped up.  There was another railroad that we called the “Weary Erie” that ran along the Delaware River, but we didn’t know much about that one.  We sort of knew that the old railroad people tended to be of Irish extraction.

So why were people in Sullivan County?  Well, it really depended on who you were.  Native American mostly were in Sullivan County because they were passing through along the Delaware or hunting during the summers.  

Settlers, mostly of Dutch extraction, began migrating into the mountains in the southwest part of the county as the portion of Ulster County where they lived filled up.

Settlers of several ethnic backgrounds, whose parents had been Tories in the Hudson Valley, in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and in northern New Jersey, found Sullivan County a place they could start over and nobody needed to know very much about where they came from and why they were there.  

Hemlock forests blanketed the northern part of the county.  They were a resource that could be captured — with people who were willing to cut them down.  Various kinds of flat stones were available for the digging by people who were willing to live in a county where settlement wasn’t complete.  

And that’s only the part up to the Civil War era!  Not surprisingly, Sullivan County was not unanimously in strong support of the Union.  There were significant numbers of Democrats, and even Copperheads, in Sullivan County.  One prominent Democrat newspaperman wrote the authoritative early history of Sullivan County: Quinlan’s History of Sullivan County.

Irish immigrants figured increasingly in the population of Sullivan County, beginning in numbers in the 1840s and continuing well into the last decades of the century.  The western part of the county was even the site of a major seminary.

There have been two distinct incarnations of Sullivan County as a major resort area.  The first, in the latter half of the 19th century, is little known today, but was significant in size and numbers.  When Sullivan County became known as a place to breathe mountain air in an effort to cure Tuberculosis, and the development of a sanitarium facility in Loomis, the appeal of the area as a vacation spot paled.  But around the time that flow of new residents paled, the birth of the Borscht Circuit — a resort area predominately of Jews from New York City — developed, peaking around 1960 and since faded away.

Since then, there have been smaller numbers of Latinos and of Hasidic Jews who have put down roots.  Brooklyn hipsters have discovered the Delaware River valley, giving rise to the slogan “Narrowsburg, not Williamsburg.”

Where we’re going with this is to say that doing genealogy in Sullivan County has everything to do with when your ancestors arrived and where they came from.  Fortunately, we have developed an extensive catalog of resources you’re unlikely to find elsewhere that will help many in tracing your Sullivan County roots.  We’ll discuss a few of them in forthcoming posts.

 

 

Sadly, some prices are going up….

Between the Lakes Group has been in business since 1999, and some of our offerings, particularly downloads you’ll find at www.betweenthelakes.com, date from CD-ROMs of historical material we have sold for a couple of decades now. Unlike everyone else, we’ve never previously increased prices on what we sell.

In those intervening years a lot has happened, some of which have increased our costs in ways that aren’t visible to our customers. For example, web hosting (paying an internet company to maintain these websites and provide world-wide connectivity to them) has gone up substantially — at least doubled.

As well, expenses we never incurred back in those blissful days to enhance web security have now become a necessity. Individually the costs aren’t large, but taken as a group, these services cost nearly what it cost to host the whole website back in the beginning.

PayPal, as you probably realize, charges us a fee plus a percentage of the purchase price for each download we sell. When you’re selling downloads for less than $2 those fees eat up most of the price you pay. We don’t begrudge paying PayPal to streamline this function; indeed we’re grateful to them for being there.

What this all translates to is that sadly, some prices are going up on our downloads of historical material.

NOTE: We’re NOT raising the prices of our printed books that Amazon handles for us. As far as we can tell, these are competitively priced, and our costs there have remained stable.

The way we’re handling the price increases on the downloads in incremental. We’re doing the increases a page at a time. For example, if you are looking at a page like Connecticut Miscellany (found at http://www.betweenthelakes.com/CT/connecticut_Miscellany.htm) we’re adjusting all the prices on that page at once.

We sell several hundred different downloads, spread across around a hundred individual pages. As you might guess, it will be a while before we get them all adjusted.

But we did want you to know that we are in this process, and you may find that the interesting download that was priced at $2 you were thinking about buying but didn’t may not be selling for the same $2 the next time you check on it.

Yes, we know that merchants raise their prices all the time. So, we’re going to raise ours. But we’re letting you know that it’s in the works, and why we’re doing it.

If you want to review our array of downloads (some of which have been and will remain FREE), we invite you to have a look at the front page of our downloads section. You can find that at http://www.betweenthelakes.com.

And, just a word to say that we’ve been procrastinating for a while about this price increase because we appreciate your loyalty.

Sincerely,

Geoff Brown, Principal Partner, Between the Lakes Group LLC

p.s. While you’re here, why not take a look at a couple of books we’re recently written: Trinity Lime Rock in Context – a History and Lakeville Crucifix.

Trinity Lime Rock in Context – a History

We are happy to announce a new book by Geoffrey Brown, called Trinity Lime Rock in Context – a History. Here’s some background:

30 years ago we started going to a local Episcopal church, here in Northwestern Connecticut, called Trinity Lime Rock. Lots of people don’t have much to do with churches anymore. However, we had kept up churchgoing, and when we moved here we continued. Eventually we settled on Trinity as the place where we wanted to bend a knee, or whatever term you prefer.

Since we’re in the history business, this institution was probably destined to be the subject of at least an article, and perhaps a book. Poking around in the records, we found a history that had been done around 1950. Almost immediately it was clear that an update was needed at very least. So with the help of archeology services the project started in a small way that, as such things do, became bigger and bigger.

Around the same time, Judy Sherman, the wife and also a historian, was wrapping up her MA in history at Hunter College. She found the local area to be a trove of old records — and some less-than-objective, occasionally downright incorrect history. So we had a familial interest in correcting errors where we found them. More importantly, we felt that making sure that anything we wrote considered the history in some kind of larger context.

We found that Trinity Lime Rock presented some opportunities, both in correction historical errors, and in establishing some context. Corrections included figuring out who the actual architect of the building was (hint: it’s not who everyone claimed it was), and exploring the many contexts in which Trinity played at least a minor role.

What we discovered

There were obvious things. US Senator William H. Barnum (who donated much of the cost of the building) was multitalented with fingers in many pies. They included state and national politics, the Barnum & Richardson Company (from the iron history of the area), a whole passel of different railroads, and a few additional ventures. Subsequent developments included a successful art community (in the Lime Rock area and at Trinity), and sports car racing at Lime Rock Park (where Trinity has successfully walked both sides of the street). Immigration, prohibition, women’s suffrage….well, you name it, and Trinity had a hand in it.

At any rate, it turned into a six year project, quickly produced one book (“Lakeville Crucifix” — that was NOT about Trinity, by the way). Now it has produced another.

The result

Trinity Lime Rock in Context – a History is now completed. You can order it in paperback, eBook, and even hardcover form from Amazon — simply click HERE We think it’s pretty good. If nothing else, there is a whole lot of information there! Have a look!

Front cover of Trinity Lime Rock in Context - a History, by Geoffrey Brown

Anyway, Trinity Lime Rock in Context – a History contains a whole lot more than the history of a smallish Episcopalian congregation in the wilds of Northwest Connecticut. It’s available in paperback (our preference), eBook, and Amazon’s new hardcover format. Take your pick! But be sure to take a look.

Why we sell what we sell….

Many of our customers at Between the Lakes Group are primarily interested in genealogy, and they can be pardoned for occasionally wondering why we sell what we sell. Yes, occasionally we do some “original” history — history that has not been told before — but most of our business consists of republications of old and out of print material.

Amy Johnson Crow is a professional genealogist who has written an article (and created a podcast) about why genealogists need to be concerned with material that goes beyond “names and dates” — why genealogists need to put meat on the bones, so to speak. We were sufficiently impressed by her article that we wanted to refer to to you. You can find it HERE.

The podcast, in case you are into podcasts, and we know that many people are, the link to the podcast is there as well.

One point she makes in her article is the importance of finding out organizations to which your ancestor may have belonged. They can tell you a whole lot about your ancestor. For example, does your ancestor’s obit say he was in the GAR? Well, that’s an easy one — it stands for Grand Army of the Republic, and it means that even if you cannot find any other documentation of the fact, your ancestor was a Civil War veteran.

However, there are a zillion other organizations, and many are not quite as easy as the GAR. We know that because we kept track of how many people downloaded our old free list of abbreviations for organizations — how you make the jump from the initials of the organization that appear in the ancestor’s obit to the full name of the group.

Suffice it to say that this is a two part assignment. First, read Amy Johnson Crow’s article, and then consider whether you actually can identify all of those organizations your ancestors belonged to that were only identified by initials.

We modestly offer a book we prepared a couple of years ago that can help with that task. Acronyms for Organizations is a great compendium of initials for organizations, and for each there are the organizations those initials stand for, and have stood for in the past.

You can get Acronyms for Organizations via Amazon, and we think that after reading Amy Johnson Crow’s article you might decide that you actually need it.

Acronyms for organizations
Here’s the front cover! Here’s more about it.

Here are a couple of ideas if you don’t want to spend quite that much money. First, consider the Kindle version. This is one book that is probably as accessible on your portable electronic device as it is in book form, and it’s cheaper too. Furthermore, you’re more apt to have it with you the next time you’re stumped by a set of initials that stand for an organization.

There’s one more alternative that will also save you some money and quite possibly answer most of your questions about acronyms for organizations. The book pictured above is actually the second (and greatly expanded) edition of this book:

The first edition — but still available at Amazon

We know it’s a bit unusual to be offering two editions of the same book for sale at the same time, but we considered that What Does That Stand For? might just be sufficient for many people’s needs. It’s also at Amazon, and it also is available in a Kindle edition at a savings.

Well, that’s a long way of saying why we sell what we sell — or at least why we sell a couple of things that we sell — but we hope you find it helpful!

Libertas Yearbook for 1950

The yearbook of Liberty High School, Liberty, Sullivan County, NY

We at Between the Lakes Group are happy to make this Item of New York State history available once again. We acquired it on eBay, and hope that some find it useful.  Given the age that living 1950 Liberty High School grads now are, we expect that this is now of more genealogical interest than it is food for reminiscence.

High school yearbooks are one form of history within which everyone is recorded when they graduate from high school. They, and their community, are frozen at a point in time that the yearbook captures and keeps. Haircuts, clothes, friends, teachers, the sense of humor of the era, the area businesses – they are all captured as they were, not as we choose to remember them or tell our children they were back in the good old days.

The senior this year were born circa 1932-33.  The Great Depression was here; the happy times their parents remembered from their own childhoods likely seemed a distant memory.  They were in school during World War II, and likely most could tell you how they heard about Pearl Harbor.  All knew World War II veterans, and some of them may have had memories of soldiers and sailors who did not make it home from that war.  Boys graduating from LHS this year stood a good chance of being drafted or enlisting for the Korean War.  And at this writing, surviving class members are 85 or 86 years old.

There are a number of interesting aspects of this yearbook.  First off, it was soft covered.  Hard covers were still a year or two in the future.  The interesting blotches of pink on the pages just inside the cover are not some form of abstract art – they are simply color that has over the decades bled from the covers.  Under 70 pages in length, counting covers, it was not an extravagant effort, but it was carefully done.

Something this yearbook has that we’ve not noticed in other yearbooks was the class “Last Will and Testament” – yes, they were a yearbook commonplace back then, but this is the only one we can remember seeing in poetic form.  Shakespeare it is not, but it is an interesting touch.

Gender roles were pretty absolute in 1950.  Girls took home economics.  Boys took shop, with long-time shop teachers AuClair and Burnham already in place.  There don’t seem to have been any shop clubs for either boys or girls, but we note that there was a “Charm Club” that presumably was intended for girls who wished to improve their prospects in the matrimonial department.  Something interesting here:  there were two clubs for boys, the Bachelors Club and the Chefs Club, in the Home Economics department.  These clubs, which sought to teach boys to cook and to keep house, seem to be a bit discordant.  With sex roles still tightly defined, the popularity of these is hard to explain, even in retrospect.

Cheerleading remained the only sport for girls.  Basketball, which had been a girls’ sport as well as one for boys decades earlier, seems to be long gone at this point.  The boys’ sports: football, basketball, wrestling, track, baseball, and golf, were Liberty’s traditional mainstays.  One interesting addition to this book: people occasionally used yearbooks to collect clippings about graduates.  One such – a sad one – is the last page of this file.

At the same time, the Golden Age of the resorts was dawning, and fast.  While we see no references to Liberty’s place in the resort community, it was certainly well established by this time and was growing.  The O&W Railroad was still in business, although fading fast.  The Route 17 Quickway was not yet there, and the trip by car to NYC was a four-hour adventure, likely with a stop at the Red Apple Rest.

Telephones were black, had coiled cords, and were usually found one to a household – and your parents overheard every word you said.  Your neighbors may have as well, on the party lines that were still common.  Television sets, on the other hand, were still scarce, and reception, such as it was, was entirely in black and white, and often snowy.

1950 was genuinely a long time ago.  This yearbook captures it nicely, we think.

Want to capture this bit of history for yourself? CLICK HERE to go to our Liberty, New York page.

A full catalog of our offerings can be found at our main website, http://www.betweenthelakes.com. We invite you to visit us there.

Meanwhile, enjoy this bit of New York State history!

Libertas Yearbook for 1950

Lakeville Crucifix interview podcast

There’s now a Lakeville Crucifix interview podcast!

We were delighted to be interviewed by Dan Dwyer, host of “Offscript with Dan Dwyer”, on WHDD-FM in Sharon, CT “the smallest NPR station in the nation.” And the subject was Lakeville Crucifix!

Dan is a first-rate interviewer who knows his local history! WHDD is an extraordinary local resource — one we are uniquely fortunate to have in our area.

WHDD has generously made a podcast of the interview available — and here’s a link to it!

To listen to the Lakeville Crucifix interview podcast, simply CLICK HERE!

More information about Lakeville Crucifix is HERE

Lakeville Crucifix

The book is available locally at Johnnycake Books in Salisbury, CT, or via Amazon.

Lakeville Crucifix — News!

We announced the availability of Lakeville Crucifix — A Religious War in 19th Century Connecticut, by Geoffrey Brown, a few weeks ago.

Lakeville Crucifix
Lakeville Crucifix, published by Between the Lakes Group LLC

Now we have some more news!

—Lakeville Crucifix is now available in the town where the events happened! We are grateful to Johnnycake Books for offering this volume (the paperback edition) for sale in their Salisbury store, located at 12 Academy Street in Salisbury. You can visit Johnnycake Books’ website HERE for more information on when they’re open and a lot more information about their wonderful inventory of rare and collectible books.

–The paperback edition remains available on Amazon, and now there is a Kindle edition available there too. One word of warning: the Kindle edition places all the footnotes (there are more than 350 of them) at the end. For some this may be a serious inconvenience. Be forewarned!

We are also happy to announce two opportunities to learn more about the Lakeville Crucifix and the 19th century in Connecticut.

–Geoffrey Brown, the author, will be speaking about Lakeville Crucifix on February 23, 2019, at 4 PM, in the Community Room of Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury, CT. The talk is sponsored by Scoville Memorial Library and the Salisbury Association, and admission is free.

–Lakeville Crucifix will be the book of the month for the book group of Trinity Episcopal Church, Lime Rock. Learn more about that church at their website — HERE

Lakeville Crucifix

Our latest book, entitled Lakeville Crucifix, is now available from Amazon.

It’s local history about a subject area that has gone largely unstudied in the part of Northwestern Connecticut that was considered to have an iron industry that was second to none for much of the 19th century.  A number of people have written thorough, careful, and fascinating books about the iron industry itself.  But Lakeville Crucifix takes a different tack.

Basically, Lakeville Crucifix is about the people who made the iron industry function and how they interacted with each other when you add nativism, Irish immigration, changes in the Roman Catholic Church, vestiges of New England Puritanism, and electoral politics to the mix.

In 1882, the Roman Catholic priest in Lakeville erected a 12-foot crucifix on the lawn of his parish church.  The following summer, the local Protestants, offended by this structure, petitioned him to remove the Lakeville Crucifix.  His parishioners retaliated by boycotting the Protestant merchants, and the merchants retaliated for that by calling on the local iron magnate, William H. Barnum, who also happened to be the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to ask him to fire all his Irish Catholic workmen.  It also happened that an ally of the aggrieved merchants was a former Governor of Connecticut, Alexander H. Holley.

The story of the Lakeville Crucifix does NOT end there!  The New York Times ran the story on page 1, it was covered in depth by the Hartford Courant, and the relatively new Associated Press spread the story all over the United States.  And, the tensions continued to mount as the local ladies organized with the intent of firing all of their Irish Catholic household help.  There are many other elements in the story, and we would be poor salespeople if we let all of the surprises out of the bag here.

At any rate, Lakeville Crucifix is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and we suggest that you have a look at it there.

CLICK HERE to see Lakeville Crucifix on Amazon!

Lakeville Crucifix
Purchase direct from Amazon.com as a paperback book or as an eBook for Kindle.

 

Thanks for visiting Between the Lakes Group!

See what else we have in our catalog!

 

 

Libertas Yearbook for 1964

Continuing our offerings of high school yearbooks from Liberty, Sullivan County, New York, we’re happy to present the Libertas yearbook for 1964.

High school yearbooks are one form of history that records everyone when they graduate from high school.  They, and their community, are frozen at a point in time that the yearbook captures and keeps.  Haircuts, clothes, friends, teachers – they are all captured as they were, not as we choose to remember them or tell our children they were back in the good old days.  The class pictured in this yearbook – their yearbook, the Libertas yearbook for 1964 – was born just after World War II ended, and had come of age at a time when Liberty, as one of the hubs of the “Borscht Circuit”, was near its peak (although few, if anyone, in this class at the time of their graduation, had any inkling that things in their home town were not going to get better and better.)

For a few things did get better. We like to track the career of Alan Gerry, the Liberty entrepreneur who built the Cablevision empire and who was the foundation of the arts center in Bethel commemorating the Woodstock festival (as well as many other good works throughout Sullivan County) from year to year.  In 1964 his business is “Alan Gerry’s TV & Appliance Co.” while it had been “Store” in the previous year’s Libertas.  Was he thinking bigger?  In the photo in the ad, a young man with a crew cut is holding a 12 string guitar – a bit of disruptive technology in the music world, and not something one would have seen in Liberty two years earlier.  Who knew?  Would these well-scrubbed Liberty kids eventually would be in enthusiastic attendance at that Woodstock festival Gerry subsequently memorialized?

In Asia, while this class was receiving their diplomas in Liberty, things were ramping up.  Although it would be nearly a year before conventional US forces were deployed in Vietnam, the Special Forces and Military Advisors were already at work when this class graduated.  Still, few in this class had focused on that part of the world.

In terms of real change in Liberty, perhaps most important was that this class was the first to graduate from the new Liberty Central School on upper Buckley Street.  They kicked the envelope by choosing white and yellow for their class colors, and created a yearbook that would stick out like a sore thumb in a stack of Libertas of previous years that tended to run to maroon and silver for their color schemes.

Bob Dylan’s second album, The Times They Are A Changing, had been out for a bit over two months when this class walked down the aisle for the first-ever graduation in the Buckley Street building.  Yes, the times were indeed changing, but in ways that few if any realized.

To go directly to our Liberty, NY page, where, if you are so inclined, you can buy and download the Libertas yearbook for 1964, simply CLICK HERE.

A full catalog of our offerings can be found at http://www.betweenthelakes.com.  We invite you to visit us there as well.

Libertas yearbook for 1964