Genealogical Eavesdropping

The internet is one supersized overshare.

Along with the thousands of selfies and blogs about piffle, plus all those YouTube videos about optimal application of eyeliner, surviving the Apocalypse, cleaning scallops using a shop vac, and SO much more, sites beyond number offer deliciously random information to the careless researcher.

And by careless, I mean "easily distracted."

​By which naturally, I refer to myself. 

I was on the track of my namesake 3x gr-grandmother, Amy Cole Hall. She lived mostly in Pennsylvania, but also in Litchfield, Connecticut. ​

Amy Cole Hall (with cat) and her daughters and possibly a sister or two.. .

Somehow (and it's always a bit of a click-mystery) I ended up on someone else's compilation of documents pertaining to their ancestors, the Sturdevants of Luzerne, Pennsylvania. Naturally, I started reading. The Sturdevants connect to another branch of my family, but I didn't know that at the time.

Oh the eternal difficulty in resisting the temptation of other people's letters...

An exerpt from a letter 14 Oct 1842 from Dr. George Lane Keeney to Salmon Keeney, quoting from a letter from brother Seth: "My wife has been counting up while I notched a stick, and we find we have (9) nine living children, 4 girls and 5 boys."*

Does this seem –– um –– peculiar that a married couple needed to notch a stick to count their living children?

The internet link to the letters is here.  

Also among the paper-trail of the Sturdevants is what might be some of my new favorite letters* of all time. Anyone who commits words to paper is aware that the record will live on; it's kind of the point of putting words on paper, right?

I made a sound recording of one letter –– both for the interest of clarity, as the grammar and spelling was irregular, but also because it was fun to voice those words. 

*My previous all-time favorite letters? A series of wonderful schadenfreude-inducing Christmas newsletters from a certain childhood friend's unhappy wife (oh! how I looked forward to those each December! Even after their divorce, I kept getting these little masterpieces of misery bedecked with images of holly and jolly St. Nick! I should be more ashamed to enjoy them, but she had such a way with passive aggression!) 

In any case, herewith the letter 7 June 1842 from Asahel Keeney to his brother Dr. George Keeney.

It's a brutal catalogue of local gossip. Burn baby, burn.

There's another letter to their sister, Amy Keeney Hall –– not my Amy, but of interest anyhow –– mentioning that poor pitiful Phebe Wilson, who "quit hur husband to keep from starving."  Brother Seth writes "we callculated to have visited you this fall but my health prevented If I live untill another fall I will be sure to visit."

​I hope he had the chance.