Wisteria

P. J. Daggett, Grocer, Great Valley (Cattaraugus Co), NY taken between 1905-1910 [courtesy Great Valley Town Historian 2015] Pliny or Plinn J. Daggett was born 21 September 1863 in the town of Eagle (Wyoming County), New York to Charles Daggett and his wife Lucy Dennis. [1] Charles S. Daggett (1825-1899) and his wife Lucy E. (1833-1921) are buried in the Grace Cemetery in Castile, Wyoming County, New York. [2] Pliny was enumerated as a 6-year-old and a 16-year-old respectively with his parents during the 1870 [3] and 1880 [4] federal censuses in the town of Pike, Wyoming County, New York. His father was listed as a farmer. These census records show that he had siblings Nelson, Allen, Edwin and Mary E. Daggett (born about 1870). Neither Pliny nor his father could readily be found in the 1892 state census. In 1900, Pliny was listed as a grocer in the village of Castile, Wyoming County, New York. His wife was Mary E. born February 1866 in New York. They had been married ele...

Lena Reynolds and her mother. 1976 A community’s history is bigger than any one individual but collectively we all play a part. Back in the early 1970s, a woman named Lena Reynolds took a class to learn how to do family history and spent the next thirty years or so actively pursuing this project, researching, collection and documenting the stories of those who had gone before her.  Front of Lena's childhood home, Ellicottville, ca. 1910 By doing so, Lena did her part in helping to preserve much of the local area’s history. Indeed, the home in which she was born in and spent the majority of her life is one of the oldest in the village of Ellicottville, New York. In her day it was a veritable museum of family items handed down through the years. The family history work she did also helped preserve part of local history as well, for the history of a people is a history of a community. Lena was the town historian for a time and her scrapbooks and note...

From the Library of Congress James Moffit (1843-1911) started The Ellicottville Post newspaper in 1884 and his son John A. Moffit (1867-1915) became an equal partner in the business in 1888. The younger Moffit arranged and edited the column “Echoes from the Long Ago” under which the following letter to the editor appeared in the Wednesday, April 15, 1914 edition (.pdf file courtesy of Fultonhistory.com ). The author of the letter was William W. Canfield (1854-1937) who at the time was editor of the Utica Observer Dispatch newspaper and the brother of John A. Moffit’s wife, Mary Gertrude Canfield (1867-1946).  Wednesday, April 15, 1914. To The Editor of The Post: President Lincoln was assassinated on the evening of April 14, 1865 or 49 years ago this year. I have heard it said that no man or woman living, who was old enough to understand about Lincoln and sense what his murder meant, ever forgot the exact circumstances under which the assassination of...

My maternal grandmother's maternal grandmother was Gertrude Bos Kiel. I imagine her to have been like my own maternal grandma, Theresa Katsma Timmer, whom I loved dearly, but I really knew little about Gertrude. Me with my grandmother, Theresa Katsma Timmer. November 2006. When I asked, my grandma told me this story of her grandma: "My grandmother, her name was Gertrude, took care of us when mother worked at the mission.   She was in a wheelchair.   She could walk though, maybe she had what I have.   My mother cleaned at the Bradford Street Mission.   My Uncle John was superintendent.   My Uncle Heiny worked there, too.   Uncle John moved out to California, near Los Angeles.   He came back to Michigan and took my grandma Gertrude back to California with him.   She died out there. " Margaret Katsma DeWitt, Theresa's sister, later said that when her grandmother died in California, her mother could not go out there, so Uncle John sent a pi...