Crooked Lake Review

Stumbled on this blog, which replaces a magazine, doing searching for my cousin.

 The Crooked Lake Review is a local history magazine for
the Conhocton, Canisteo, Tioga, Chemung and Genesee river valleys,
and for the Finger Lakes and Lake Ontario regions of New York State.

I wonder, looking at the serialization of this old novel, whether the Miss Elliotts of Geneva were based on any of the Rippeys.  From the 1992 preface:

The Misses Elliot of Geneva was written as a humorous tribute to the eccentric characters who flourished in Geneva, N.Y., at the beginning of this century. The two characters who are featured in the title were based on an actual pair, but anecdotes about other bygone Genevans are often interwoven with the originals, so that to some extent they are composites. The original pair were more polite, and their utterances more circuitous than those of 'Miss Primrose' and 'Miss Candida,' whose tongues have been greatly sharpened, though I have not exaggerated their underlying prejudices. One of the pair, I am told, actually left money in her will to the City of Geneva, and had taught a Sunday-School class in her younger days.
The other characters are also somewhat exaggerated, but together they present a picture of a small-town society.
When the book first appeared, there was some indignation among older Genevans, but one of them admitted that "after all, I wouldn't mind being remembered for my witty remarks."

Welcome Cousins

Through ancestry.com I've heard from several cousins (very remote).  I've been sporadically working on a Harshaw/Rippey site, using Google's wikipedia-type software.  At least in theory anyone who wants can add pages, changes the existing pages, and so forth.  I write "in theory", because I'm still trying to understand the software and how best to organize the material.  My ultimate goal is to use it to replace the Harshaw Family site linked to on this blog.  Anyway, any newcomers are welcome to this blog and to the site, and feel free to make changes to the site.  Each page has a "revision history" so a mistaken change can always be undone.  Unlike the real wikipedia though, there seems not to be a discussion page linked to each site page.

Harshaw Leaves Wilkes Barre

Here's a noninformative description.

WR Harshaw

My grandfather was ordained in 1885, when  he was 30:


The same page of the General Assembly minutes of 1886 shows him (and his brother Andrew) as being installed.



But this listing refers to a different location:

H.M. Harshaw's Career and Research

Graduated from West High School in 1914. link

Graduated from University of Nebraska (doctorate) in 1929.  link. [Updated--this is wrong, graduate U. of Missouri around 1924 or so, taught at NE}
Co-author (4 others) of paper on feeding B-12 to calves at U of Minn, dated 1924.  See abstract.

Co-author (2 others) of paper on effects of heat and light on antiscorbutic vitamine, in 1921.  See paper.

Lead author of a 1941 paper on quality of frozen poultry as affected by various conditions.  See reference.

Other papers from a google search for "H.M.Harshaw", including a couple translated into German.

H. Mac Harshaw

Had a BS by 1921 at University of Minnesota:

Mac's Doctorate Thesis

Mac (Harold McCloskey Harshaw) got his doctorate from the University of Missouri with the thesis listed here by the National Research Council in 1925-6. (I'm not sure it was awarded in 1926, because the listing may cover degrees from 1920). The listing says its for nutrition requirements for mammals. [Updated to add a link to the listing and replace a scroll box with the last sentence.]

Blue Plaque at Dromalane House

This site has photos and a description of the recent ceremony.  There's also pieces here and here.

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.

Chanceford Township History

I was stimulated to revisit the History of Chanceford Township. One interesting point--a