By Loraine Anderson
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If anyone had looked into my future five years ago and told me I’d take a vacation one day to upstate New York and spend it in cemeteries and libraries, I would have thought their crystal ball was cracked.
Give me a beach. Put me on a bicycle, in a kayak, on a hiking trail or a street somewhere in Europe.
Why would I ever spend a vacation driving hundreds of miles to look for obituaries, gravestones and pictures in local museums that would put names to the faces in 150-year-old family photos?
But here I am, a genealogical Nancy Drew, surrounded by old camping gear, a CD of photo images, the family tree stuffed in a notebook with lists of Niagara County cemeteries and local museums.
My laptop is decked out in its special traveling/camping attire, a 16 GB flash disk tucked in a pocket. Brochures and maps of Lockport, Lewiston, Erie Canal, Underground Railroad, Dickersonville Road and Niagara Falls lie next to my traveling library:
- “The Living Great Lakes,” by Traverse City’s Jerry Dennis, with a bookmark for the pages where he describes a voyage on the 363-mile Erie Canal to New York in the tall ship Malabar;
- “Martin Brook,” a novel about an abolitionist minister by Morgan Bates, who was the son of an abolitionist minister and nephew of the Grand Traverse Herald founder (also named Morgan Bates).
- “On the Brink: The Great Lakes in the 21st Century,” by Dave Dempsey, with paper clips for its sections on the Niagara escarpment.
- An empty journal, embossed with the words “Women’s Rights National History Park, Seneca Falls,” given to me last year by the Grand Traverse Area Women’s History Association after a talk I gave on area woman’s suffrage efforts and our pioneer links to upstate New York. What has happened to me?
Why do I feel the same excitement I had whenever my mother began packing the car to take my brother and I to places like Gettysburg, Washington, D.C., the Empire State Building and Wisconsin Dells?
I know the answer.
An 1863 Civil War letter, written by my great-great-grandfather and given to me by an older cousin in 2006, has happened to me.
Researching and writing local history stories for the Record-Eagle 150th anniversary project in 2008-2009 and Reflections By the Bays, the paper’s year-old quarterly magazine sold on area newsstands, has happened to me.
A new-found cousin, who gave me a whole limb of the Dickerson family traced back to 1639, fell out of cyberspace. I will meet him and his wife for the first time on this vacation.
History and family have come alive again — and they are such gifts.
Loraine Anderson can be reached at 231-933-1468 or landerson@record-eagle.com.
