An ad from 1973

This was sent to us by Sylvia Hasenkopf. It’s a picture of an ad placed by Joseph Groom (one of our house’s inhabitants from days of yore) in 1793!

Descendants at our Door! And I don't mean the stairs.

We have just been contacted by a descendant of William Brandow and Joseph Groom (born in 1748, before the Declaration of Independence!), previous occupants of this very house!. She and her grandmother (also a descendant) are going to come visit us, and let us interview them. Hopefully, they will be able to help us fill in some of the gaps in the history of this place. I'll put everything up once I have their permission in early July.

An ongoing correspondence 4 ...

Beers in the History of Greene County mentions that the Dutch settlers were mostly farmers who kept their lives simple,” they married wives, planted, they ‘builded’ but know little of life beyond their narrow limits” (farms). He compares the Dutch to the English, citing the Dutch as having lives lacking in “excitement and enterprise” while the English were actively engaged in community and civic life.

The Grooms however, were active enough in the growing communities of the future Greene County. It is assumed the Groom family resided in what was then the district of Coxsackie which included all the land that would later become Catskill and Athens. Both William and Edward were signers of the Coxsackie (Dutch) Declaration of Independence (from the British) in 1775, a year prior to the 1776 Declaration in Philadelphia. (Had you known there was such a thing? I didn’t.) While the War for independence never really touched Greene County (at this time it was still Albany County) Joseph and many of his neighbors joined the Albany County Militia as enlisted men. The names of all the neighborhood folk appear over and over in deeds and records of marriage.

The Howard Hall Farm site was considered part of Coxsackie until the formation of Catskill in 1789, and in 1787, William was assessed by the town for $16 in owed taxes.

We can assume that Joseph Groom had an interest in community politics as we know that Joseph, then age 41, was present at the first town meeting when Catskill was formed and he was listed as “collector”. A copy of the Catskill packet (the original still exists in the Vedders library) contains a copy of an advertisement taken out by Joseph to prompt the citizens to pay owed tax moneys. I am going to try to get a digital image of the original newspaper ad, if they will let me. Better that than Xerox.

While I have yet to find out from exactly where the Groom family resided prior to building the stone house, or from whom they purchased the property, (those records may be in the Albany County Court house or State library), it is possible William purchased the land directly from the one of the original families that owned parts of the Loonenburtg patent, as the patent was broken into smaller partitions or lots. Most of the landowners were Dutch farmers and their names repeat throughout the records of marriages, wills, deed descriptions and the like. Joesph Groom married a Van Loon, the property was bounded by Hallenbeck, Van Hoesen and Brandow, (Aaron) whose brother William was the son in law of Joseph (a guess, not verified). In other words, their lives were quite intertwined. The History of Greene County gives a fairly detailed description of the Loonenburg patent and how it was divided, mapped and divided into lots numbered from 1 to 146, although all original maps have been lost. Just an aside, in 1796, Aaron Brandow sells his brother, William, lot number one, lying on the patent line. This could very well be the son-in-law of William Groom, or grandson, as is referred to in his will. In a description of the lots and their owners, Beers mentions lots 71 and 72 as the Sprague farm (this was in 1881), previously owned by Joseph Groom,. The earliest deed I have copies of is of the sale of the Groom farm after William’s death in 1812. The deed transferring lot 71, 72 and 127 from Joseph Groom to a Benjamin Haxton of New York City and the deed refers to the land being in the Loonenburg patent, The boundaries of the property sold are vagtue; certain trees, piles of stones, but does mention bordering the land of William Brandow, son in law and John Van Hoesan. This son-in-law could very well be the owner of lot #1, The deed of transfer from Groom to Haxton lists sale of 210 1/16th acres, selling for $8000, and refers to a survey and map attached to the deed made by John D. Spoor. (we do not have a copy of that; another thing to research!)

An ongoing correspondence 3...

The house, it seems was built to be sort of grand at a time, 1780, when there were very few families living in Loonenburg, or what would become first Catskill in 1787, then eventually part of the town of Athens in 1815. Beers (History of Greene County guy) lists the number of families that were known to be living there (Loonenburg) in 1780 at only 46, and the William Groom family is one of them. And let’s not forget times were “iffy” in terms of political stability for the colonies…wasn’t there a war lurking? And the Hudson River Valley a strategic part of the war campaign’s?

I found a copy of the 1790 census, another tingle moment as it is a copy of the original hand signed one. William Groom is listed as head of the household in Katts Kill (Catskill) with 3 white males over 16, 1 white male under 16; 8 White females and children, and from other sources I know there were at least 1, maybe 3 slaves. (slaves were listed on the census, but the old records are missing that part of the page next to Groom) I also know that William, the “head of the family” was born Wilem Groen in 1719, of Dutch parents, Edmond and Antje Groen, making him in his early 60’s when the house was built. He married a Sara Cottington, also born in Albany County in 1720, and between them, they had 4 children, the first, Edward in 1744.

Joseph was the younger son, born in 1748. He married a Rachael Van Loon in 1770, and by 1780 had produced a brood of children, having at that time probably 5 of either 7 or 9 children, depending on which records you are looking at. A guess would be that the 3 white males over 16 were William, Edward and Joseph, as Joseph had no sons at that time. The 8 females could have been the 2 wives, and 6 children. The only problem with that theory is that Edward Groom is also listed separately as a head of household with 3 white males over the age of 16, one male under 16, 7 females and children and 3 slaves.

Assuming it was Joseph’s family who filled the house, when that census was taken, 3 of the children would have been under 10 years of age, the youngest being 3. When Rachael Groom, the mother, died in 1795, Joseph quickly took a new wife, Hannah, Schermerhorn, (married in 1796) and probably with obvious need and reason.

Regardless, they could easily have filled up a house without Edwards’ family, if he did indeed live elsewhere. Joseph’s name does not appear separately on the census, so my guess is he, at age 42 with 7-8 children makes up the inhabitants of the stone house.

I know this is a lot of math, but I really needed to figure out why they would build such a big house unless they either had a lot of people or money. So, I have a head count, but don’t know anything more about them.

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.