Sometimes there are people who get lost of family trees - children who died young or in infancy, people who grew up but never married, usually those without direct descendants trying to find them. Lately I've been trying to find and record the young children who have been lost on my tree, but today while doing some research on Fulton History's newspaper archive website, I came across a piece in the Nassau Daily Review Star from January 20, 1941 by William Golder, reminiscing about his Aunt Beckie Raynor, a spinster, and Uncle Jacob Raynor, a bachelor. Well, William is my first cousin, 4x removed (his mother is the sister of my 3x great-grandmother) so Beckie and Jacob are my aunt and uncle, too. I've known for years about Beckie and Jacob, as the spinster sister and brother of my 4x great-grandfather, James Washington Raynor - I've always known Beckie as Rebecca, though, like her mother - never knew she had a nickname! I've always known next to nothing about Jacob, and the big thing I knew Rebecca for was having an incredibly detailed will outlining her many nieces and nephews, their spouses, and where they lived - basically your dream will, if you're a family historian. But William's memories of Beckie and Jacob shed tons of light on them as people - she enjoyed the company of the young people in town, reading their fortunes in tea leaves. Jacob was eccentric, enjoyed reading about astronomy, grew grape vines, and loved to look at the stars with his telescope. This is an amazing part of genealogy, not just discovering a person, but discovering who they were.
Websites I used for this research:
Old Fulton New York Postcards: www.fultonhistory.com
