David Pomeroy

Thanks to a message through ancestry.com I now know more about a second cousin: David B Pomeroy.

My grandmother, Ada Rippey Harshaw, had an elder sister Mary, who married F. Crawford and had children, including Ada Vere Crawford.  Ada Vere married a Pomeroy and had 6 children, with David Pomeroy her youngest.  Ada's husband died in 1918, 2 years after David was born.  David grew up to be enlisted in the Army in March 1944.  (Enlistment record says he had one year of college and was separated with dependents.) After training he was shipped as a replacement to the 134th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division which had been fighting since early July. 

He was one of the volunteers for the "Baby Patrol", which rescued 80+ young children from a chateau between the American and German lines.  He was later captured and served out the war in a POW camp.

West Pittston Photos

Found this website with photos of West Pittston.

West Pittston Flooding

Apparently West Pittston was flooded by tropical storm Lee. The parsonage was very close to the Susquehanna. [Updated: NYTimes article.]

Ralph in Foochow

Inspired by word that Yale is digitizing mission records, I did a search for Foochow YMCA and got this hit, a picture showing the board of directors in 1920, with Ralph second from left in rear row. According to this, Ralph was also the photographer.  There's also this picture of the building, with the note it was donated by Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.  And this photo of the YMCA Boy Scout troop (Ralph's not in the picture--he took it).

And this story has no connection with the Golds, but I can't resist it:

"The congregation in a small rural Fujian country church decided to repaint the church, but only had enough money for about ten gallons of paint.  They did it anyway, in faith, praying that the paint would not run out, even as the oil did not run out in the Old Testament story of Elijah and the widow.   When the paint ran low, they added paint thinner, but managed to complete the entire wooden church with just ten gallons of paint!

But no sooner had they finished, a very untimely (for that season) thunderstorm broke upon the church, washing off much of the paint that had been thinned.  And a voice from heaven said, "Repaint, and thin no more!"

The Harshaw Diaries

As of now the diaries of James Harshaw are not accessible on the Internet.  I expect that to change, but until they do this Newry Journal piece provides some highlights which may be of interest.

Stewarts and Lower Chanceford in the Civil War?

York county is the next county east of Adams county, the county seat of which is Gettysburg.  It's near enough it had a fair amount of Civil War action.  The York blogs have mentioned some of this.  This post at Universal York has a list of names from Lower Chanceford township which were in a hastily-alerted unit mustered during July 1863.  I see several Stewarts, who might descend from Capt. John and Mary Orson.  I also note some surnames which are familiar in NY: Grove, Fulton, Boyd, Smith--I often wonder whether the migration to Geneva, NY accounts for some of the overlap in names between the two areas.

With this number of men from Lower Chanceford, I also wonder how many were away fighting?

More on Rippey/Ripy

The Ulster Scot now has their June 2011 issue online for downloading. Page 14 has an article on Dr. William Rippy, linking the lineage to Ripy Whiskey in Kentucky. Note that I've linked to the page from which you can download the publication.  When I did so, it opened in Adobe Flash, but my Firefox 3.6 browser bogged down later.  The Adobe Flash plug-in apparently started using all the memory I had.  I ended up uninstalling Adobe Flash from Firefox.

Dr. William Reppe/Rippy/Rippey

Genealogy boards have reported that the Rippey family originated when a Dr. William R.. emigrated to the UK. Marjorie passes on information from an UlsterScots newspaper article, which also stimulated bit more research.


Dr. William Reppe had a flourishing medical practice in Paris.  He fled Paris probably after August 24, 1572, the date of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestants. While most Huguenot refugees who came to Britain settled in England, the good doctor went to Scotland.

There he apparently became friends with the Hamiltons, because in 1610 he moves to Ulster (County Tyrone) as part of the Hamilton/Montgomery settlement.  (That's the settlement in which a Harshaw also took part.)


There's a commune (town) called "Reppe" on the eastern border of France, about 30 miles north of Basel Switzerland, which might possibly be an ancestral home.



View Reppe/Rippy in a larger map

A House Captain John Saw

We don't know what the house of Captain Rippey and Mary Orson looked like, but here's the York Town Square blog post on the Willis house, which dates to that time.

1905 Report from West Pittston

Frpm The Westminister, a new series of The Presbyterian Journal

The First Presbyterian Church, West Pittston, Rev. W. R. Harshaw, D.D., pastor, has closed a prosperous year. An accession of fifty-two members, and a total of 580 of a membership reported to the General Assembly this year. The congregation has given this year a little over $19,000 for various purposes, about $14000 to missionary and general benevolence, and the remainder was spent on its own immediate field. The Italian mission which has been conducted by this church for a number of years is now under the superintendency of Rev. Jerome Vavolo. The work still prospers, and it is hoped in a short time to erect a building for this branch of the work.

I don't know whether the increase in membership means grandfather was an evangelist or was simply gaining by adding the children of his members.  I suspect some of both.  According to wikipedia, the population of Pittston increased by about 21 percent between 1890 and 1900.

Municipal Reform and Good Government

Revs.A.H and W.R. Harshaw were among the signatories of this open letter in 1890: (The People's Municipal League was a Progressive organization, presumably a part of the National Municipal League which later became the National Civic League.)

MISRULE.

New York preachers have united in support of reform in city politics. Municipal misgovernment, a topic of constantly increasing importance, has not often been more trenchantly discussed than in the following address, signed, September 22, at a public meeting, by over one hundred representative ministers. We gladly make it a part of our record of current reform.

The undersigned are ministers of religion. As such, their office is to help their fellow-men to a righteous life. In so doing they must needs consider and advise touching the application of moral truth to political as well as personal and social questions. It is only when such advice meddles with indifferent subjects involving no moral issues and so assumes the form of mere partisanship that it can be justly condemned as inappropriate and pernicious. On all questions affecting the public morals it is the duty of those whose province it is to preach righteousness to warn the people against the dangers of a vicious solution and to urge them to a virtuous course.

It is for this reason that we address our fellow ministers of religion in the city of New York at this time, in relation to the moral wants and dangers of the metropolis that has been so highly favored of Providence, and ask them to join us in seeking to overthrow the rule of falsehood and fraud that now disgraces our city.

We make no charge against individuals, for we have confidence in many who are now in official places, but we distinctly impugn the methods and habits that have for a long time prevailed in almost every department of our city government. Men are placed in important posts of honor and trust who are notoriously of depraved life, the frequenters of liquor saloons and houses of vice, and educationally unfitted for any municipal duties. They manage their official influence solely for their personal profit, or for the furtherance of the party that gave them their places. All public interests under such control either languish or are directly injured. The immense income of the city is fearfully squandered, and under pretense of urban improvement jobs are created which never realize the improvements, but put thousands of dollars in plunder into the pockets of contractors and their governmental allies. It is estimated that the city of New York could be maintained in all its present condition for three quarters of the sum annually expended, and this estimate is made by comparison of the cost of maintaining the other great cities of the world, and with due regard to the difference in values of labor and products in the different countries. According to this estimate, twenty-five per cent. (i. e. $8,000,000) is wasted annually, and so much added unnecessarily to the taxes of the people.

But this waste of money is the least evil. Loose views and practices are popularized. Dishonesty in many forms pervades the community and loses its disgraceful stigma. The police who should be the picked men of character in the community are notoriously in the pay of the law-breakers, the high officials and the courts of this department being thoroughly tainted with public suspicion. The Excise Board make it easy for the disturbers of the peace to ply their vocation, and protect them against the complaints of outraged citizens. Money is found to be the key to open any difficulty and to shut off the efforts of justice. The poor are therefore oppressed and have no resource of relief. Every place, however humble, under the government must be bought. The poor man, who cannot obtain the hundred or the thousand dollars necessary, has no chance. Fitness for the place is of no account. Money and party are the only watchwords that gain an entrance. The effect of such an administration on public morals cannot be overestimated. In commercial circles the young men are tempted to follow the example of the officials who flourish by fraud, and as a consequence we have constant robberies by trusted clerks and defalcations by esteemed bank officers, so that public confidence is shaken in the institutions erected for public security. The whole tone of intercourse between man and man, as seen from the records in the daily papers, is lowered, and false dealing is looked upon as a trifle.

Now is this all? The debauched life of many public officials leads the young to the lowest forms of vice, as they learn to couple success with debauchery. A drunken police captain will be the model of a hundred youths in his precinct, and a high official frequenting a house of ill-fame will have a thousand follow in his wake. Vice is made a prize instead of a disgrace to young men by the vicious conduct of men whom they see to be in authority, and whom they regard as samples of success.

That these causes act directly and powerfully to increase crime cannot be doubted. The very government that is constituted to suppress crime and prevent it becomes the minister of corruption and multiplies the sources of criminal life.

There is another aspect of the problem of municipal reform intimately connected with that which has been presented above. A city government exists to order the conditions of life favorably for the mass of the citizens. As far as may be practicable, it must seek, if it be a true government, to lighten the burdens of the wage-workers, to ease the strain under which the poor earn their bread, to broaden the way to success for the average man, to promote the health and happiness and welfare of the mass of the people. It must concern itself with securing equitable taxation, with enforcing just legislation in behalf of labor, and with guarding public franchises. It must provide clean streets, healthful homes, ample school accommodations, and the best possible system of education ; rapid transit facilities, whereby families of modest means may make their homes in the suburbs; public baths, museums, libraries, etc., — in short, all that makes for manhood, physical, mental, and moral. This problem of good government is the problem of philanthropy. Therefore it is the problem of religion. But every religious endeavor is handicapped by our inefficient and corrupt administration. The money which might be spent on public improvements is largely wasted. We could not intrust such schemes of public improvement as other cities have carried out to brilliant success to any but capable, honest, and public spirited rulers. To aid in obtaining such rulers is the urgent duty of all religious men, in the interest of humanity. We ministers of religion, whose duties lead us to face sadly the wretchedness of our great metropolis, call upon our fellow ministers, as well as on all religious people, to put into this practical form that religion which teaches that the love of God is the love of man.

We are perfectly certain that the vast majority of voters in our city desire an honest and clean government, but they are ever failing to obtain it. And why? Simply because the great political parties of the' country manage our local politics, keeping up their political divisions to the ruin of the city, that the parties may be continued compact for the national contests. This is the excuse which sends men by the thousands like sheep to follow their leader and vote for the "regular candidate," be he ever so mean or corrupt. It is this party spell that must be broken in the city of New York, if we are to have a good and permanently good government. Good citizens must work together and vote together for good men, utterly ignoring party lines. To this end there must be organization. The People's Municipal League is instituted to divorce our city government from state and national politics, to nominate candidates for ability and integrity, independent of parties, halls, bosses, and factions, and to place the government on a foundation of righteous business principle, and by these means purify the moral atmosphere of our metropolis. We look upon this as a religious duty, and are not to be deterred by any fear that the organization may be used by adroit politicians, for we trust in the righteousness of the cause and in the high moral sense of the great majority of the community. We therefore invite all ministers of religion to unite in this movement, and to put before their congregations the importance of using the elective franchise for the purpose of a pure government, as against the demands of corrupt party organizations. We ask no one to leave his party on any state or national issue, but we ask the members of all parties to unite on a moral and not a party basis in the direction of our municipal affairs. Thus with a clear conscience and in the honest pride of citizenship the good people of New York will use their power, and the day of deals and bosses will be over. Fitness and faithfulness will be the ruling condition of office, and the public morality will be guarded by the public administration.

We put before the people the names of those who are perfecting the organization of the citizens, as a guarantee that no party end or personal advantage is sought, and that but one aim actuates the movement, the purity of our city government.

The address was signed by the following ministers : — Bishop Potter, R. Heber Newton, Howard Crosby, Morgan Dix, Gustav Gottheil, De Sola Mendes, Charles H. Parkhurst, James O. S. Huntington, David H. Greer, Felix Adler, Charles F. Deems, Benjamin B. Tyler, Robert S. MacArthur, Ensign McChesney, Abbott E. Kittredge, William T. Sabine, G. Frederick Krotel, Robert M. Sommerville, William Lloyd, George James Mingius, Carl Erixon, Samuel S. Seward, Amadous A. Reinke, Alexander Walters, Edward B. Coe, Wellesley W. Bowdish, Theodore C. Williams, Conrad E. Lindberg, Charles C. Goss, Homer H. Wallace, George Shipman Payson, George S. Baker, Waldo Messaros, Conrad Emil Sindberg, S. B. Rossiter, J. W. Brinckerhoff, George E. Strobridge, A. H. Harshaw, Benjamin Brewster, C. E. Bolles, Charles E. Bolton, A. P. Ekman, James M. Whiton, L. H. Schwab, W. J. Macdowell, George D. Dowkoutt, Henry Wilson, Paul Quattlandery, Charles J. Holt, R. E. Wilson, J. G. Scharf, Thomas Dixon, Jr., D. M. Hodge, W. Warren Giles, Thomas Douglass, William Huckel, James M. Philputt, Charles B. Smyth, John Parker, Madison C. Peters, H. Weinchel, Jesse W. Brooks, H. Olsen, George G. Carter, Robert Mason, Frederick Glenk, James Chambers, John Sutton, William H. Lawrence, B. Hopkins, J. Warden, A. B. Lilja, Walter M. Walker, A. H. Burlingham, George M. Mead, George H. Mayer, P. Watters, Edward D. Flagg, Henry M. MacCracken, Aaron Wise, Thomas Drummer, James H. Cook, Peter Stryker, George H. Simons, Isaac McGuire, W. R. Harshaw, J. W. Foster, Hayman Bradsky, .William Musgrave, Joseph Saxton, William Westerfleld, Clifton H. Levy, Theodore A. H. Meissner, Ellsworth Bonfils, Charles L. Thompson, W. C. Bitting, Thomas J. Ducey, Walter B. Floyd, Newton Perkins, Jacob Freshman, Charles B. Smith, G. Edwin Talmage, Henry Morton Reed, Joseph Baird, Frederick N. Rutan, John Henry Hopkins, James H. Headley, William A. Layton, Joachim Elmendorf, F. Hamlin, J. S. Stone, Gottfried Hammaskold, Arthur Brooks, J. G. Bates, Joseph Reynolds, Jr., S. De Lancey Townseud, S. D. Burchard, C. C. Goss, Philip Schaff, J. F. Busche, Spencer H. Bray, James A. Reed, A. F. Schauffler, R. N. Kidd, Samuel Buel and I. Ansonelliz.

In spite of the citizens' and the preachers' organized activity, corrupt politics triumphed in New York city in the November elections. This fact makes the foregoing address all the more significant and memorable.

Golds in Minneapolis 1922

Ralph Gold and Disarmament

This bit surprised me.




From this  This wikipedia article provides a bit of background.  I'm not sure what interest the YMCA would have had.

The Coal Strike of 1902

I posted here the article Rev. William Harshaw published in Christian Work and Endeavor on the anthracite strike.  Here's an editorial piece in the same issue.  (The thrust is the "Church" should bear the burden of educating the immigrant children, not the state.)

A Lesson of the Strike.

The weighty article which we publish elsewhere in this issue throws a ray of light on the dark question of the present difficulties in the coal regions. A disease must be diagnosed before it can be cured, and the author of this article, a young minister living in the mining region and making it his business to know the people and their problems, brings an important contribution not only to the diagnosis but to the cure of the frightful malady from which not that district only but the whole country is suffering.

That the miners are mainly foreigners is well known, and was cogently shown in these pages a few weeks ago. But the profound significance of the fact that right in the heart of our country a great body of 150,000 people, upon whom the nation depends for the fundamental necessary of life and of business activity, are absolutely incapable of becoming a part of our social fabric, and under existing conditions must remain an alien mass in the body politic, undigested and indigestible, has not been made clear until now. These people do not speak English and are not learning to speak it. Their children do not go to school because there are no teachers who can understand the languages they speak—Lithuanian. Hungarian, Polish and the like. And as the children never come in touch with English-speaking children they cannot absorb the language as foreign children in our cities do by contact. So they go on from father to son living in filth and squalor, in intemperance and lawlessness. However inadequate the miners' wage may be to provide the necessary means of decent living it is more than sufficient for these people because they do not know how to live decently and have no example of decent living before them. Hence intemperance and lawlessness in the highest degree.

It is therefore Mr. Harshaw's conviction that even before the ministries of religion these people must have education, must be taught to speak English; and he is doubtless right. Nevertheless it appears to us that the situation is one rather for the Church than for the Government to deal with in its initial stage. Just as the first Sunday-schools, with their primers and spellers, were the entering wedge for the common-school and universal compulsory education, so it would appear that in the present situation it is the Church, with its voluntary teachers and its genius for self-abnegation, that must pioneer the way for a practical system of public education among these foreigners. The local churches are beginning to recognize this need, and Mr. Harshaw is only one of several ministers who are manfully doing their part in humanizing these people and making them otherwise capable of citizenship than by mere residence in the country. A movement for educating as well as evangelizing the Poles, started three or four years ago in Pittsburg, is spreading eastward through the State and westward into Ohio and further. The Presbytery of Lackawanna, in the heart of the mining district, has taken up the matter, and is making at least preliminary arrangements toward effective action. Among the Magyar population is one minister, possibly there are more, endeavoring to educate and enlighten the people of that speech. But individual action, however intelligent and and devoted, will not meet the need; the disease is too violent and too contagious for any but large and comprehensive measures. Not even a single denomination may be able to cope with the situation. The imminent and urgent call is to all denominations represented in the coal regions, acting in concert, and strongly backed up by their national bodies, to undertake the eminently religious work of making English-speaking Americans of such isolated and alien populations as are found in our mining districts. If the strike shall so call attention to these populations as to bring about such action it will not have been an unmixed evil.

I liked the "young minister" reference--W.R. was 47.