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.

An Ongoing Correspondence

So a few weeks ago, I started, armed with a small clipping my friend Ursula had found in the NY Times on how to research the history of ”your” house, I embarked on what I assumed would be a hastily dispatched chore. I looked at the warnings of the difficulties in really coming up with concrete information with a sort of lofty distain; I, of course would use my intuitive research skills and cut through the drudgery in record time and, well, just get on with it.

And so I did, at least, start. Frankly, owing nothing to a single ability I possess, the most important fragment of information came right at the beginning of the process from the Vedder Research Library (for Greene County history. Reggie and I dashed up there for one of the rare open library moments and while trying to decide how to plunge into the task, we stood staring at a map of Greene County of about 1881 or so, and realized that it showed what we were pretty sure was our house with the horse-shoe drive and indications of another drive around the back of the house for deliveries. And there was a name on the house: George Griffin. Considering there were very few names of actual people on that map, this seemed terribly impressive and from there, I was sure that all we had to do was find George and home free!

Then, the most amazing thing was that upon scanning a copy of the Beer’s “History of Greene County”, in the Athens history part, suddenly the name of George Griffin popped up again, but this time referencing not only the previous owner who sold it to him, but the owner before, who, it stated, was a “very prominent man of his day”; Joseph Groom. A definite tingle-all-over moment! But the tingle will have to do until I get more time to do the forging ahead some more stuff.