Roots

[Note that this continues the previous post.] Nearly 30 years ago I became interested in tracing my family tree. This activity was helped along enormously by stumbling on a published genealogy of the Camp family, which enabled me to trace my father's paternal lineage as far back as the Thomas Camp, originally of Virginia, who pretty much supplied the South with its Camps. The man had two wives who each produced twelve children, all but three of whom were boys, who all went on to have a whole slew of children, most of whom were boys.

The maternal side of my father's family has been harder to trace. His mother's father, Robert Terence Quinn, was from Liverpool, of Irish parents -- my only ancestor to immigrate to the US. later than the 1600s -- and to this day I have been unable to learn anything more about his family. He came to this country alone, at a very young age, and did not enter at New York or Boston, as did so many Irish immigrants, but at Galveston, Texas. During the 1880s the ships that landed at Galveston were almost all German; hence the large number of Germans to be found, rather surprisingly, in Spanish-flavored San Antonio. Although some of those ships could have stopped at Liverpool, Robert Quinn is not on the passenger lists (now available online) of any of them. My father believed young Robert stowed away one of these ships when it was docked at Liverpool, was probably put to work when he was discovered by the crew, but was never on any official list. One of the family mysteries, hopefully to be solved one day.

Then there's my fraternal grandmother's great-grandfather, Jonas Casterline, born, according to his army papers, in Seneca County, New York in about 1815. He served in the U.S. army in the early 1840s, fighting Seminoles in Florida. He married a young army widow whose husband had been killed by said Indians. He finished up his service in Corpus Christi, Texas, where he was mustered out in 1845, and a few of his descendents are to be found in south Texas to this day. But I have been able to learn nothing about his parentage, or the rest of his ancestors.

For many years Jonas was one of only two Yankees this girl with a very southern heritage had been able to find in the family tree. The other, William R. Cole, married Jonas's daughter, Mary Jane Caster-line, in about 1869. I knew from the 1870 census (for Refugio County, TX) that William was from New York, but never knew where in New York, or how he came to be married to a Texas belle.

Several years ago I had posted queries on some of the online genealogical forums (e.g., Genforum.com) about William, but never got any response. Last fall I tried again, and this time received two responses that opened a floodgate of information about William, his parents, and their ancestors. All of a sudden the Camp family had a very substantial Yankee heritage indeed, going all the way back to a Miles Morgan who immigrated to Plymouth Colony from Wales in about 1636.

But of all the fascinating information I was suddenly discovering, the most amazing, to me, was that my great-great-grandfather, William R. Cole, was born and grew up in the same county as, and just a few miles from, the small town where this girl from Texas had chosen to go to college, Oneonta, New York. Is this a heluva coincidence or what? At the time I went to school there I didn't even know I had an ancestor named William Cole, since my interest in genealogy did not develop until several years later.

At any rate, I decided this trip to Binghamton to see my friends provided the perfect opportunity to take a look at the little communities associated with the Coles and the Rockwells (William's mother was a Rockwell). There is a web site with the rather macabre name of Findagrave.com. There I had found pictures of a grave marker for William's father Richard, as well as for his grandfather, also Richard. I wanted to see these graves for myself, and also, hopefully, solve a mystery that had arisen. On this same web site, when I did a search for William R. Cole, I came up with the same grave marker (which is actually a big, impressive monument). Could William be buried there? I knew he had died in Texas (according to family tradition, he stepped on a rusty nail and died of blood poisoning, at the tender age of 25), but it occurred to me that perhaps his body had been shipped back home. I wanted to see if I could find out. I did know that I had never been able to find a grave for him in Fulton, TX, where his wife Mary Jane is buried.

So now that I've bored you with my family history -- which was the motivation for my little side trip -- I will tell you what I found in the beautiful, bucolic countryside of Butternuts Township, Otsego County, New York.