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.
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.
