New York On My Mind

 In New York, I have some dead relatives.  A third great grandfather William Seger was Dutch.  He was born in Albany, NY. Somehow he ended up in Tully, NY which is near Syracuse.  He married Paulina, had a bunch of kids and died young.  I was able to find the cemetery where he is buried, but the grave marker, if there ever was one, is not visible today.  The Christian Hollow Cemetery is overgrown back in a field. I hiked back through the field to the cemetery.  It was a beautiful day and I said a prayer for the lost father of young children.

William's widow Paulina had a very young baby when her husband died.  She soon married her husband's cousin Garret Houck who was younger by several years than she was.  She had a few more children with him.  She is buried with her second husband a few miles up the road in Cardiff, NY.  She outlived him as well. I wondered about her hard life, losing two husbands, bearing many children, cooking, mending, sewing.  They carried water from the creeks.  There were no stores to buy clothes or food. Her children from the first marriage, left and moved on as soon as they were teenagers. My great great grandfather was one of those teenagers.

Paulina's father lived a few miles down the road in Tully.  Captain Andrew English served in the Revolutionary War.  He was wounded at the Battle of Monmouth. He settled in Tully with his wife Rachel. I found his grave in Tully.  His wife Rachel migrated with some of their other children to Alton, IL.

I was most surprised by the Catskills which begin around that region.  For some reason I thought New York was flat land in the middle of the state.  It is not.  There are mountains. Low, small mountains but it seems to me they are more than hills.

I want to go back again to New York.  I think that the trail will lead me to Albany and Binghamton.  I will love to see the mountains and the lakes and learn about how people lived in the 1800s in that place.