An Ongoing Correspondence 2...

So here is where I am about the history: we know someone prominent had to have built this grand old stone manner house, but Joseph Groom the one? Well, last week, sure that was easy to find out, I would marched off to the Greene County Court House to just get copies of all the deeds. I had no idea how to do that, and that New York Times Article warned that it was not as straight-forward as one imagined, but surely, the court house had a hot paper trail to the truth!

Well, sort of. The start of the search quickly proved my inability to navigate most library and or official computer systems that require the user to remember and use a series of commands like F5 followed by…. Annoying the staff soon materialized the information I needed: that each deed referred to the previous deed transfer by actual book number, and the actual books were there, all lined up and yes, there were Xerox machines! A Snap! Well, until I realized the books were huge, the machines giving only 8.5x11 sheets and at some point back in time, the books stopped being there! And that point for me, was around 1881 (I am sure that is not the actual date, but the last deed in my chain to be there) and at that time, they were of course all hand written! A certain charm to that, but somewhat difficult to decipher, at least to me, without a lot of work, and I was still convinced this process was a snap.

And then, what about before the last deed I found there? The deed I was scrutinizing was the sale of the property by George Griffin’s widow to a Samuel Sprague. It referred to 5 deeds that made up the land being sold and they were about purchases made between 1835 and 1849. They were all logged by book number and page, but the books I needed were nowhere in the courthouse that I could see. Those old books, I was told, were up the street in a sort of Annex and I could access them there. Up the street I scurried, only to find myself in a sort of warehouse of old brown-paper wrapped record book, and was told, if I was lucky, the books I wanted had not been destroyed when the new courthouse was built and the older records moved to storage. Destroyed? Yes, it seemed the “guys” moving stuff sort of got tired of it all and….? Oops!

I did manage to find 4 of the 5 documents of the land sales to George, but the one that probably would have been the most significant is the deed transfer between Reverend Joseph Prentiss to George Griffin. Prentiss, it seemed had been an incredibly popular guy in Athens and Catskill, being the first Episcopal Rector in the newly formed church in Athens. And he, I knew was the link to that prominent man, Joseph Groom. Without the deed, I could not really trace with certainty (at least not by court house record method) the line of ownership back to Groom.

But Groom it has to be, at least in my mind. So now, on to find the kernels of information about the Groom family.