Thursday, July 30, 2009

Long Island and return

We just arrived back from Long Island having successfully seen all of our daughter's belongings loaded onto a North American Van Lines truck headed for her new teaching post. She doesn't have a lot so will not be too enormous a job to unpack it all when she heads for her new position. We had packed about 80% of her belongings before we left in mid-May. However, it still took a full day of packing to complete the preparation. It was very warm there and working (even with the airconditioning running full blast) was very difficult. We went to Jones Beach in the evening and had a lovely walk along the ocean beach.

The traffic going down to Long Island was really heavy last Sunday and we waited two hours to cross on the George Washington Bridge to Manhattan Island with a much shorter wait to take Throgs Neck Bridge onto Long Island. The four days passed quickly with last minute packing and a trip into New York City to see the Museum of Art - always a really pleasant visit although we were noticing that it was similar to ROM although on a larger scale. Last ride back on the Long Island Railway for a while I expect. I do not think we would have ever spent so much time in New York City or on Long Island if she hadn't been there. It gave my husband the opportunity to really look at all the places where his ancestors lived - he has over 70 early Dutch/French/Belgium ancestors who lived at New Amsterdam (now New York) and about the same number or perhaps slightly greater who lived on Long Island. We have now visited a number of the areas where his ancestors lived in the 1600s (up to the 1800s) including Block Island, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Dutchess County, New York. We will need to have a longer look at New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Once I feel like being in a car for longer than 20 minutes!

No research at all. I completed reading the book :The Tribes of Britain: Who are we? and where do we come from? by David Miles. A really interesting read although very heavy. Length is 500 pages but that wasn't the weight. Rather the detail that he provides necessitates one spending quite a bit of time either remembering the history of the time period or looking up all of his references.

Our films have arrived at the Family History Library - I ordered Hutton Cranswick (Yorkshire), Driffield (Yorkshire) and Bradfield (Berkshire). My husband ordered two Mecklenberg films (Brohm and Staven). We anticipate spending at least two weeks going 4 or 5 times in the week to work our way through the films. I am looking for the Sproxton and Wiles family at Hutton Cranswick and the Harland, Cooper, Sproxton, and Wilkinson families at Great Driffield. At Bradfield I am hoping to learn more about Nathanael Lambden who was baptized there in 1724 - the son of John Lambden and Joan Caruthue. I have not been able to find the marriage of Nathanael Lambden and Sarah around 1851.

My husband is looking at his Schulz, Passow and Naumann families. We already know that the Schulz and Passow families are in the Brohm register but would like to have a longer look at this parish. We recently discovered Staven as a possible place of baptism for his great grandmother Rachel Naumann.

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