Wisteria

The Freedom Crossing Monument pictured here is located on the bank of the Niagara River in Lewiston, New York and honors the courage of fugitive slaves who sought a new life of freedom in Canada. Ironically, they had to flee the United States in order to find freedom.   [The following article was originally written and published in the March/April 2021 issue of Eville Events and has been edited here.] I lived in Florida as a child and moved to Western New York in my early 30s. Some would say this was a reverse move in comparison with others who usually leave the northern chill for sunnier clime. At that time, I had been researching my own family history for ten years. No one in my father’s family ever strayed past the Mason-Dixon Line. My mother’s family was second and third generation American having emigrated from the Netherlands in the late nineteenth to very early twentieth centuries.   The only thing I had ever heard about genealogy research in the northern states was that N