HAPPY BLOGOVERSARY TO ME !

Well it's been a year since I stepped out into the world of Blogging. I felt a little like I did about 65 years ago when I stepped out on that door step and into the sunlight. "What I'm I doing out here naked to the world ?"
Well just as life has treated me pretty fairly, this trip on the blog has been a lot of fun. When I started I wondered if I would find anything to write about, but it seems interesting stuff always turns up in genealogy.
I called the blog "Bits and Pieces" because when started genealogy all I had was a few scraps of paper and a lot of facts floating around my memory banks. I needed to record some besides a list of names and dates in a computer program. A blog adds a little life to the hobby!
And then all of a sudden you get followers, which you would think would cause added pressure, but it doesn't. They are there to support you.
Thanks for showing an interest in my "Bits and Pieces".

A.K.A. Poppy--"I need your help"

I received a phone call this afternoon from my oldest grandson, he's in the fourth grade and the project is due Tuesday. He had to answer 10 questions about someone in the family who emigrated to this country.
So I thought my mom was the most recent (1920) and the youngest (age 4) and I have the most information on her. She was born in 1915 in the Azores, in the village of Sao Amaro on the island of Sao Jorge. Her parents were here before (her older sister was born in the U.S.) but returned to the Azores.


The family returned here on the S.S. Manchuria, sailing on 7/28/1920 and arriving in N.Y. on 9/4/1920. From there they went back to Taunton Ma.
Her father was a weaver in the cloth mills of Southern New England.
I received most of this info after I had posted on a Google group for Azores genealogy. The folks there were so helpful. Of course this made me go off onto another tangent and I looked into the history of the Azores. I found one of the early settlers in 1439 was a Flemish knight William van der Hagen of Bruges , which the Portuguese translate as Silveira Borges. This is the name my mother had written down for her mother, grandfather and great grandfather. I had always thought it as a middle and last name, but it seems it was combination name carried down though the ages. At any rate to get to the point, my ggrandfather did not approved of my grandmothers marriage.
He felt she married beneath herself and disowned her. Love is blind. They were married for almost 50 years and raised two great daughters.

People from the Barnes' Box Part I

Portraits of Rodney Barnes, Mrs. Rodney Barnes, and two children Emerson and Darwin were in the Barnes box of pictures. They were all labeled with narrow strips of paper with their names in the same script. I had no idea for their relationship (although tonight I did find him and his wife Roxanna Horton in my piles of paper).. I felt he may have been a brother to Monroe Barnes my wife Nancy's GG Grandfather. I suspect another unlabeled photo maybe Monroe and his wife Ann. I'll be posting the others along with a photo of Ann in another post.
Rodney Barnes


Roxanna(Horton) Barnes

Emerson Barnes


Darwin Barnes

Emerson Barnes
So not knowing who Rodney was, I e-mailed Mr. Alderman the Burlington Town Historian (an a distant Barnes cousin). He was kind enough to send the following info about Sherman Barnes . Last year he had told me that Sherman and Monroe families were "Universalists" and that Sherman built telescopes. I later found that Monroe lived in Meriden Ct. for a while and was a founder of the Universalist Church there. What Mr. Alderman sent appears to be from a history and gives a glimpse into life in the mid 1800's.

With many enjoyable things in the life of the village, not the least was the astronomical "observation given by Sherman Barnes with the aid of a telescope" of his own make. This later became the property of Yale college, Mr. Barnes replacing it with another still better. He was at all times interested and pleased when people came to his home, to show them what could best be seen at the time in the heavens. When the planets and stars or moon were showing at their best he would invite his company to meet on the school house lawn or street to study the skies. He was son of Joel of Wise, and lived west of Caleb N. Matthews. He married Luana Smith, daughter of Gideon. The children were Rodney, Cyrus, Banebridge, Juliette, Hannah, Monroe, Gideon and Amelia.

Mr. Barnes had a machine shop on the brook near His Home, the old house place of Gideon Smith his father-in-law, opposite and beyond was in the now almost deserted district of Falls brook and the "Nigger Bridge," Mr. Schriver lives northward from the bridge. Southwest from Norman Matthews lived Josiah Barnes, father of the twins Elias and Eliada Barnes and a younger brother, Austin. The house is a ruin and the sons gone.
I would say life in the "Barnes" home was interesting to say the least. At the bottom of this blog is a photo of the brook his and Monroe's shop was on.
I should make a photo of "Whigville" as it has changed little since Sherman held those sky viewings.

A Trolly Man's Holiday

James P. Wrenn b.1880 in Tulamore, county Offaly, Ireland. He died at the age of 48 in New Britain Ct. About the only thing we knew of him was that he was a Motorman for the old Connecticut Company. We had no pictures of him, so when my wife saw her paternal grandfather in the paper, she optained a copy from Ruth Hummel at the Plainville Historic Center.

James Wrenn is front and center with the big mustash

The article explains how the trolly companies created parks to bring folks out of the cities on the weekend. When I lived near Crystal Lake there was a long straight as an arrow dirt road that intercected our dirt road. My dad said it had been a trolly line that went out to the lake. As a kid, he remembered going out there and also out to Lake Compounce here in Bristol. My father-in-law (Leo) told me about the work trollies carrying "traprock" (crushed rock) from the quarry in New Britain all over Ct. Today
we could use such a system in our area.
The article is shown below.



This Picture and article was run in the New Britain Herald back in 1994. The story was written by Ruth Hummel from the Plainville Historic Center.

Katherine Gaylord a Mother in the American Revolution

I noticed this monument in the Milford St. Cemetery in Burlington Ct. and although I had heard her name I had never heard of the Wyoming Massacre.
Ever since reading about the events of 1778 and her heroic return home, I pass many homes along Rt 6 between Danbury and Bristol and wonder which she may have stopped for shelter. There are many fine renditions of her story that I can not hope to equal.
The area had been fought over by the Six Nations , Pennsylvania and Connecticut for many years and the residents were no strangers to warfare.
Katherine's husband had served at Bunker Hill in 1775 and was a Lieutenant in the Ct. militia. Most of the young men of the area were off serving in the Revolutionary War leaving about 300 mostly older men for defence. They ventured out without known the size of the force they would encounter. They entered a trap and were surrounded by over a 1000 Indians, British Rangers and Tories. One account says only 35 survived. Aaron Gaylord was not one of them.
Aaron had counseled his wife to prepare to flee if he did not return. She fled at midnight with her three children and two horses. She left behind a surrender that only lasted a few days before more death and destruction. She lost one horse the second day and traveled in fear of being captured for days. Travel was slow crossing streams and rivers finding shelter under their blanket or abandoned cabins. For a time she felt they were being stalked by a panther. They were befriended along the way by hunters soldiers and friendly Indians or going hungry for days.
Today that trip is 199 miles and according to google a three and a half hour car trip. Their original trip to Wyoming was about three weeks, hers back to her fathers home much longer I would guess.
One rendition written by Florence E.D. Muzzy is contained in [A History of Bristol or "New Cambridge"]. It is on Ancestry.com and at our local library.
Another shorter version(but longer than mine) is on the Burlington historian's site :
www.munic.state.ct.us/BURLINGTON/burlington_articles_of_the_past.pdf
It starts on pg 95.
I think Katherine's story is very compelling and reminds me of my childhood favorites "Drums along the Mohawk" and "The Last of the Mohegans"

Celebrate Your Name Week

And LESTER is my nameo ! I think that might be a song. It's a name that rarely is used now, in fact one site I looked at didn't even list it. It's also a surname of early settlers in the New London Ct. area. I'm named after my paternal grandfather who I never knew. My nephew has it as a middle name, and my Uncle Frank was born Lester Putnam Larrabee. He went by his Christening name Frank. Jeepers if I knew that I might have gone by my Christing name of Michael. It might have saved me a lot issues in school ;-)
Back in those days Catholic priests only would baptize you with a saints name, I wonder what John the Baptist required?
I'm glad I'm named after my grandfather as I believe he was an independent person. As the story goes he left the farm at an early age. They found an axe and his initials (LML) carved into a stone out in a back pasture. (I've seen it). He then hopped a train that ran behind the farm ( the Belfast and Moosehead RR) over to Waterville. He was a lumberjack for a while before becoming a railroad engineer. I wonder if he learned his trade on one of those 2ft track engines they used in the woods back then? I may not have hopped a train, but I sure didn't end up as I had started out to.

IT'S A MYSTERY

It's a cold gray afternoon, and we are waiting for a nor'easter to hit tonight. Its expected to drop between 12 to 18 inches of snow. So I ask you, why did over 100 Robins appear today? They covered the lawn looking for worms. They ransacked the leaves in the woods. I guess they may have found grubs in the leaves, but I doubt if there was a worm to be found.
I have heard that some winter over around here in the swamps, but I've never have seen that. Robins do appear in the early spring and some times I've opened some paths on the lawn, hoping they can find some thing.
I do wonder about things like this. Perhaps I should join Twitter and a "Robin" could send me a tweet ;-)