End of the World After NERGC? Bummer!

Chances are, you’ve never been to or even heard of Low Hampton, New York. 

It’s not very big – just a stop in the road, really – across the state line from Fair Haven, Vermont and one of several similarly sized hamlets in the Washington County  town of Hampton – a town of 23 square miles with fewer than 900 people. It’s one of those “you-can’t-get-there-from-here” places that you find all over upstate New York.

Its claim to fame is William Miller’s chapel, erected in 1848.  William Miller was a Pittsfield, Massachusetts-born farmer who moved to Low Hampton after the War of 1812.  His uncle Elisha Miller was the Baptist preacher in Low Hampton.

Chances are, you’ve never heard of William Miller, either.  If not, you’re probably also not familiar with the “Great Disappointment.” 

The “Great Disappointment” came about all because William Miller (pictured left), formerly a farmer from Washington County, had been studying the Bible, and specifically the Old Testament prophecies. 

But the trouble with prophecies and with angel’s voices, which Miller and many of his followers heard, is that the message contained therein  is not always crystal-clear.  Especially when  it comes to terrestrial dates.

October 23, 18 44 was a particularly bad day, truly a day of “Great Disappointment.”   

You see, Miller and his followers had determined – based upon careful Bible study – that Jesus was going to return to earth on October 22, 1844. 

At least, that’s what they were sure the Bible said.

Many of Miller’s followers sold everything they had and, dressed in white robes, waited for the inevitable End Of The World.  (Cue the drums and trumpets)

Problem is, October 22, 1844 came and went.   

No Jesus. Bummer! 

Hence, the “Great Disappointment.”, sending Miller and his followers – thousands of them – back to the drawing board. 

(Hint: Ancient Hebrew calendars are really very, very difficult to figure out…)

There’s a lot more to the William Miller story, but that’s not the point of today’s post.  Rather, I want to give you fair warning that Miller’s spirit is alive and well, and is currently touring the country by bus.

Check out this link to the UK’s “Daily Mail” newspaper.   

Then, if you’ve made any firm plans for May 21^st, 2011, you might want to see if you can cancel and get your deposit back so you can spend it all on your big blast of a party on May 20th.

If you're concerned and want to learn directly from the prophetic source himself, here’s the direct link to Harold Camping’s (the modern day William Miller) website:  http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/may21/

And you thought those Mayan prophecies were something to worry about?   

Silly you!

Can Oral History Uncover Family Links That Stretch Across New York from Derry To Montana?

The Butte, Montana Skyline

More than a dozen years ago, I began collecting every scrap of data I could find on a group of Irish Catholic immigrant families who settled in the Finger Lakes region of New York State near Hammondsport as early as 1838. These families, who were joined by others in a series of chain migrations that spanned more than four decades, formed the nucleus of my personal prosopography (group biography) project.

One of the individuals in my project was a farmer named Patrick York, who came with his parents to Trenton, New Jersey and then moved to New York State.

On Wednesday, 23 February 1892, the Hammondsport Herald, the weekly newspaper published in this small Steuben County NY village at the foot of Lake Keuka, noted the passing of Patrick York, age 63, a native of County Derry, Ireland, who had arrived in America about 1852 and settled in Hammondsport during the Civil War. 

Ten years later, the Herald reported the death of his wife’s sister, Bridget Quinn, herself a former Hammondsport resident, far away in Butte, Montana. By then, York’s daughters Minnie and Nancy had also moved to Butte and found employment there as school teachers.  Another of his daughters, Mattie York, married attorney (later Judge) William J. Naughten in Hammondsport in 1903 and then moved to Butte, where her sisters and her husband’s brother James Naughten were living. She was joined in Butte a year later by her unmarried sister Nellie York.

One of her husband’s brothers, Rev. Francis James Naughten, had been the pastor of St. Gabriel’s Church in Hammondsport for many years. By 1904, Father Naughten had been transferred to the Catholic Church in nearby Hornellsville, but most of his close relatives, by blood and marriage, lived far away in Butte, Montana.

Why Butte?

The story of Butte, Montana is a uniquely American story of immigrant success.  It is also the story of the Irish laboring class, who came in waves, directly from Ireland, from Irish urban ghetto communities in the Midwest and Northeast, and from places like Steuben County, New York in search of work and fortune.  

Butte was a mining town, home to Cavan immigrant Marcus Daly, whose Anaconda Copper mine made him fabulously wealthy.  Butte was overwhelmingly Irish, an "Irishtown", with robust Ancient Order of Hibernians and Clann-na-Gael chapters, five Catholic parishes (one of which – St. Patrick’s – claimed 10,000 members by 1901), and neighborhoods called "Dublin Gulch" and "Corktown".

The story of Butte’s Irish community was wonderfully told in 1989 by David M. Emmons in his masterful book called The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875 – 1925. My personal interest, of course, was in the magnetic draw Butte seemed to have for the rural eastern Irish, who grew up in places like Hammondsport, NY.  Little is known about what actually drew them to Butte.   

Was it extended family? Letters from friends? Newspaper accounts? Recruiters?

Someday, I may find the answer to the question of why Patrick York’s four daughters all moved from Steuben County to Butte, Montana.  In fact, the possibility of finding that answer was just greatly improved by the announcement that Michael Collins, Ireland’s ambassador to the United States, has presented a check for $100,000 to the University of Montana – Missoula to help support an oral history project called “The Gathering: Collected Oral Histories of the Irish in Montana”, which will be housed at the Butte – Silver Bow Public Archives. Details can be found on Montana Sen. Max Baucus’s website here. 

On behalf of all of us who trace the fortunes of Irish immigrant families, and as my Derry-born great-great grandmother (who knew Patrick York and his daughters) would likely say – “Go raibh mile math agaibh”, Mr. Ambassador!

Governors' "Papers" - Should Genealogists Care What Happens?

NYS Gov Benjamin Odell (1854 - 1926)

Periodically, the New York State Legislature introduces and passes a bill requiring the state’s governors to turn over their public papers to the New York State Archives at the end of their terms.  So far, every governor who has found one of those bills on his desk has vetoed it, usually hiding behind the magic curtain of fiscal responsibility.

“Too expensive”, he says.  “Not so,” say the archivists, “we can do it with existing space and staff.”

Nearly every newspaper in the state has urged the current governor to sign the current “Governor’s Papers Go To The Archives” bill now on his desk, but most believe he will not, despite all the compelling reasons why it might be a good idea.

The most compelling reason - all these papers concern public things done on public time with public resources and public employees to achieve public purposes - doesn't seem to ever hold much water with any of the governors.

They all seem to cling to the idea that these are their own very personal and private papers.

Right now, outgoing governors can clean out their desks and files (and those of their office staff, like their appointments secretary, who vets all gubernatorial appointments) and take it all home. Or to the landfill.

For many genealogists, this is probably a big “ho-hum” story. After all, what possible relevance to family history could “governors’ papers” have? Don’t we have bigger fish to fry, like vital records access?

Well, consider what governors do, and remember that a lot of it is that kind of “behind the scenes” work that rarely makes it into the news.

For example, governors are at the end of the line in the legislative process. All kinds of things come across their desks, including any number of bills that affect individual citizens (special pension legislation, commission appointments, memorial resolutions, etc.), along with supporting documentation that often contains dense biographical information.

Then there are things relating to “bad guys”. So, if you have any black sheep in your family (and even if you don’t), consider the case of Squire Tankard.

Tankard, who was from Chautauqua County, shot his sister-in-law Margaret Beaumont with a revolver.  He was convicted of murder in Jamestown and sentenced to death in November 1899.  His sentence was to be carried out on January 15, 1900.  They didn’t lollygag much in those days.

The method of execution was to be the newly introduced electric chair, which would soon acquire the nickname of “Old Sparky”.  The gentleman who had the job of pulling the switch was euphemistically known as “The State Electrician”.

Tankard, however, spent the spring of 1901 in prison.  Why?  Because Gov. Theodore Roosevelt had granted him what is known as a “respite” less than a week before his execution, on the grounds that he may have been insane when he shot Mrs. Beaumont.  Later, Roosevelt’s successor, Benjamin Barker Odell, Jr, commuted Tankard’s sentence to life imprisonment in the State Prison for the Criminally Insane.

That’s one of the things governors do – respites, commutations and pardons. And all the background paperwork that is presented during the decision-making process becomes part of the package known as  “governor’s papers”.

For Tankard, we have documentation of Roosevelt’s actions, since he allowed the printing of the high points of his gubernatorial career in a set of volumes titled “The Public Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, Governor”.  The Tankard respite, found on page 227 in the 1900 volume, is below.

However, printed excerpts and highlights are not the same thing as “papers”.

Imagine what great family history detail could be gleaned from the actual Squire Tankard file, and the hundreds of others that Roosevelt reviewed!