Surprise Surprise Surprise

While putting in my 4 hours of volunteer work at the Chestnut Ridge Historical Society, I was surprised at some of the facts that I uncovered as I sorted through some of the paper material that was still stored and barely accessible. It looked like a major undertaking and it was at first. Almost an entire box filled with notes, copies of deeds, wills, and service records had been gathered by one woman and her family donated them to the Society. The sad part was there is so much information buried there that wasn’t available to the public, but I’ve started to make a dent in it.

I placed the deeds in one folder, the wills in another, and so on. When it came to the service records, many of which were from wives and children were filing for benefits for their disabled or deceased loved one. With several sheets of information on each veteran from the War Between the States, I separated them into family names for easier access. That emptied one file and it was set into order.

Reading and deciphering the handwriting was absolutely to ascertain their content. Some were requests from widows, some were from amputees, and some were from disabled men because of respiratory problems caused by untreated pneumonias. It was interesting and the tales pulled at my heartstrings as I read the difficulties of those soldiers.

Perusing more deeds, I read about a man on his piece of property that he claimed saw an Indian (his term) crawl into an unheated outside oven for the purpose of attacking the unsuspecting family. The settler had no gun, but used a rail to beat the Indian to death. Thus was the frontier at that time.

I found one interesting note from the Revolutionary War. It wasn’t written at that time, but the information was written in the briefest form to preserve the information. What do the names Timothy Thayer, Deborah Sampson Gannett and Robert Shurtliff have in common? They are the same person. Deborah enlisted as Timothy Thayer, but failed to meet up with her company. Later, she donned man’s clothing, enlisting in Massachusetts under her brother Robert’s name. She was wounded in the thigh in Tarrytown New York and treated it herself. It became infected and a doctor examined it, but kept her secret and wrote a medical discharge for her. The notes at the Society says that she enlisted twice to escape marrying the man her mother decided for her, but in a search of other records I gleaned the date she joined was after the time she was married.