Grace Rippey

Turns out there are two Grace Rippeys, one is the daughter of Joseph Rippey, son of Rev. John Rippey, born 1882. The other is the daughter of John Black Rippey, born 1887. She is the one who married Burt Easton and had a son, Eugene Easton, and is buried in the New No. 9 Cemetery.

What happened to Joseph's Grace? An unsolved mystery.

Cruise of the Celtic

I stumbled on this during the last week. William and Ada Harshaw were part of a cruise to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land in 1902. There were about 800 people, many ministers included including Josiah Strong, an early Social Gospel leader, on board the Celtic, which seems to have been one of the newest and best steamships afloat at that time. As a souvenir, different people (mostly ministers) did pieces describing their visits to the various ports and points of interest (Gibraltar, Algiers, Athens, Constantionople, Haifa (Holy Land), Egypt, Luxor, Rome, Florence and London among them). This was assembled into a souvenir volume, which is now on Google Books: The cruise of the Celtic around the Mediterranean, 1902: Souvenir volume

The Crawfords and Google

Cousin Marjorie bugged me about blanks in our genealogy. I wasn't optimistic because I thought I'd done a good job researching in the past. But grandmother Ada Rippey's sister Mary had married a Frederick Swartz Crawford (a Presbyterian minister, of course) and I hadn't found any descendants. So, rather idly, I Googled him, and got a hit because he was one of the descendants of Michael Sprenkel, for whom there is a big family tree. He was an immigrant from Germany who ended up in York county, PA, dying in 1748. I gather the Germans were in the northern part of York, with the Scotch-Irish in the townships near the Maryland line, although they tended to move out, to the south, the west, or the north like the Rippeys before and after the Revolution.

The hit provided me with information for four children, Ada Vere, Elizabeth, Carl, and Frederick, from which I was able to tie Ada Vere to her husband, Claude Pomeroy, by whom she had 6 children, 2 girls, 4 boys. Also got some information for the others. Fortunately there were other family trees available to help, as well as to offer the hope of communicating with fellow researchers, when I get to it.

Stimulated by that success, I went back to Ada's brother, Joseph, and his two girls: Grace and Josephine. Made a little progress, though I may have turned up two Graces.

All in all, a productive weekend

Two Views of North Fenton

Going through old photographs I found two photographs looking northeast from our farm past North Fenton up the Page Brook valley. The first is in color, taken about 1974, from Richards Road at the south boundary of the farm. The pasture is the hillside which is invisible. It wasn't picturesque because it hadn't been used for a few years and had not been clipped, so it had started the process of growing brush and small trees. It's fall and the far off trees have changed color more than the nearby ones.

From Bill's Miscellaneous Photos

This photograph was taken from approximately the same point and the same angle, except this time you can see the pasture. You can also see there's many fewer trees visible. There's a handful in the fencerows on the farm, which by 1974 have become a full line of trees. I think the general impression in the 1974 photo is of a farm surrounded by woods, not so in the 1910's photo.