Abraham Brown of Westchester County, NY, Scranton, PA, and Newfield, NY

My hubby finished a 94 page monograph on his Abraham Brown line early morning on January 24, 2021. A couple of hours later, while working out on his Nordic Track, hubby collapsed and was gone. My life changing event. We'd been married 52 years. One of the things I knew I had to do was to finish the monograph that he'd worked so hard on for years. The 94 pages is only the body of the document. There is also an appendix of all the obituaries and society notes. It has taken me a few months to be able to concentrate enough to tackle this project. I'm doing that now. When I finish indexing, the documents will be printed, bound, and sent to the usual respositoties. In the meantime, I thought I would share some of Ray's writing on this family through this blog. Abraham Brown was born in Westchester County, NY in 1772 before moving to the Scranton, PA area. From there his family moved north and settled in Newfield, New York. Here is an excerpt from that chapter. According to his sons, Abraham came north by horse and stone boat in 1809. He surely followed the Susquehanna River and perhaps took the Chemung River to what is now Waverly or perhaps Elmira, NY, before following the valley trails north towards Cayuga Lake. Land records indicate he first settled in the Town of Lansing but soon moved to what is now the Town of Newfield and was one of the first families to settle there. Their last two children, Adonirum and Holden Tripp, were born in New York and Abraham and Susannah remained in Newfield the rest of their lives. Running southwest from today’s village of Newfield, NYS Route 13 goes to Elmira through a valley locally known as Poney Hollow. The valley was originally called Saponey Hollow in reference to the Saponey Indians, members of the Iroquois confederation. By the mid-1800’s the valley was heavily inhabited with descendants of Abraham and Susannah Brown. Abraham’s homestead was located on what is now known as Sebring Road, just south of the intersection with Test Road . The barn still stands on the eastern side of the road and, according to Marc Whitney, who grew up in the Cape Cod style house across from the barn, the foundation stones from the original house are incorporated in the basement . According to the Agricultural Census of 1850, Abraham Brown’s farm consisted of 160 A., of which 70 A. were considered improved. His farm was typical of family farms of that time. He raised a variety of animals including milk cows and sheep and grew wheat, rye, oats, buckwheat and Indian corn. The Cash Value of the farm in 1850 was $7,000. Although an active farmer, Abraham Brown also established and managed a hotel located along the highway running between Ithaca and Elmira. Pictured below, the hotel was apparently quite successful. As noted in The Landmarks of Tompkins County, his youngest son Holden Tripp Brown said his father kept a hotel for thirty years. “His first hotel was a log house, but soon he built a frame house, and had a large patronage, often having twenty teams and their occupants to provide for at once.” The building is now a private residence located at the intersection of Sebring Road and NYS Route 13. Ray left organized files on this family, so if there are anyone researching this line and needs help, between Ray's paper files, and digital files, I should be able to answer.

Family Search Family Trees – A Problem

The new FamilySearch.org website has a feature in which you can build your family tree. It is quite sophisticated in that it allows/encourages/facilitates genealogists to add sources, photos, stories, and in time audio clips.

My hubby volunteers at the Family History Center and regularly takes their Saturday classes in order to be on the cutting edge of the new features offered at the FamilySearch site.

One of the family tree features is when you put in a name, the site searches through its “zillion” records to see if there is a match. If so, it gives you the list and if your guy is there, you can then attach that person and all its research to your family tree.  Neat, huh?

Yesterday we found this was not so neat.

Another feature is you can check a “Watch” box that will tell you if anyone has made changes to your family tree.  You can then check those changes and if incorrect, you can contact the person making the changes. If there is a dispute, Family Search will arbitrate.

Yesterday the “Watch” feature notified hubby of changes to his relative Abraham Brown. Now realize, Abraham was a challenge to research, but trips to the Westchester, NY historical society and to Scranton, PA we were finally able to document that Abraham was indeed born in Westchester County, New York.  And from there hubby carefully researched and documented Abraham’s family that ended up in hubby’s home town of Newfield, New York.

Hubby was quite surprised to see that his information on Family Search was now changed to show his Abraham Brown was born in Rhode Island. Hubby contacted the person making the changes as no citation was supplied.  The man replied he had just taken the information off Ancestry.com!!!  OMG – when will people learn that information without citation is fantasy, and research is needed!!!!!

Bottom line is the man who linked the Rhode Island Abraham Brown to hubby’s Abraham Brown admitted his was a different one.

Not the end of the story. Hubby found that also attached to his family line were all the children of the RI Abraham Brown that had similar birth dates.  Hubby spent all afternoon correcting his family tree removing all the erroneous information.

To say the least, hubby was not a happy camper.  FamilySearch.org has to come up with a better way for linking families.   We were great advocates but now are discouraged with that site.  We have better things to do with our time than spend it correcting wrong data.