Saturday Challenge- Ancestral Towns

This comes from GeneaMusing's fun challenges from early December. I finally got a chance to finish writing it.

1)    Have you ever visited one of your ancestral towns?  If so, tell us the town, where it is, when you went, and who are your ancestors from that town.

This could be a very hard question to answer. Does anyone have a few hours to spare to hear the complete answer? Probably not and it would be very boring. So, I will just summarize the ancestral towns I have been to.

Ward Farmhouse

I was born in a city where my parents had once lived and many collateral ancestors lived at various times over the years. I arrived home to what had been my grandparents’ farm and where one of my great-grandfathers had stayed during his last illness. Before I saw my first birthday, I surely had seen the towns where my one paternal line had lived in the little over hundred years they had been in America. Also, I had been to the village that my grandparents were living in and my grandfather’s parents had lived in at one time.

None of these were genealogical in nature. My parents weren’t interested in genealogy even after I got interested as a teenager. Instead, these visits were part of the day-to-day living of my parents. Many of my father’s ancestors had lived in the same rural communities for many years. These were the towns and villages of southern Cayuga County and a few in the northern end or nearby counties. An area where current relatives lived, my father made fuel deliveries as part of his job and that we might visit for any manner of reasons.

My mother’s family had been in Skaneateles for parts of two generations prior to her birth and not far away for previous generations of her paternal line.

Mother in front of her childhood home

Grandma Wooster was a different story. She had emigrated here from Ireland in her late teens. I have been to Boston, an area she first lived in and her final home of Skaneateles. I have yet to get to Brownsville, Texas where she was stationed in the Army.

Grandpa Wooster’s family had come “from the east”. I have explored Columbia County, Derby and New Milford Connecticut. All of these are places where the Wooster families have lived since they arrived from England in the 1600s.

I have also visited where his Great-Uncle lived in Indiana. There I visited the family graves, and although I didn’t have enough time to connect with living relatives, I found where people live that are likely descendants of his oldest daughter. Their house and surrounding area that I was able to see and take pictures of, was part of her and her husband’s original farm.

their Indiana farm

Some of my Ward lines, namely, the Titus family came to Cayuga County from Dutchess County in the eastern portion of New York. I have been back there a couple times since my first visit, but it is an instance during that visit that stands out in my mind. I had just started researching to discover some of this family. While there I visited some Quaker Meeting Houses, their churches, as I knew the family had been Quaker. The Oblong Meeting House was open for tourists, but nobody was staffing it. I walked in there and had a feeling. It was if I wasn’t alone, but surrounded by a presence. A welcoming and loving presence. It was only later that I found out the Titus family had been active in this meeting, and helped build the meetinghouse.

Oblong Meeting House

That is the short version. Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to read the long version? I could detail many of the places they lived over the years…