Separate but not equal - yet

Last week Ancestry.com posted a new collection of yearbooks from American universities.

Searching new collections like this one is often a disappointment, since broad-based collections covering multiple years, multiple publications, multiple institutions! are rarely as broad as they say they are. Companies like ancestry.com open the collections for searching as soon as they feel they’ve gained some level of critical mass, but completeness is seldom a criterion. So searching the collections often leads to no hits, even if the collection claims to “cover” the information you seek. An inexperienced researcher might conclude that the information does not, in fact, exist. Opening collections early isn’t a bad thing. It’s just that searchers have to know to come back regularly and often to repeat the same searches over and over, in order to find new information as it is added.

All complaining aside, I searched the database for a number of family names. Only one search was successful, but it was a great find! My search for Evelyn Clift turned up a hit in the 1923 MIT Technique Yearbook. She was a graduate member of a club? sorority? of women students called Cleofan.

The word “cleofan” is an Old English verb, from which our verb “to cleave” is derived. Cleave means to separate or split, and the Old English "cleofan" carried the same meaning. So this group of women students intended to separate themselves from the men on campus into their own club, which would presumably focus on their own unique issues and experiences. The modern verb “cleave to” also means to hold fast together, so the women who founded the group may also have intended the group to provide common support to all the women on campus. What a perfect name for a group of women students in a men’s university!

From what I can gather from various web resources, the Cleofan club at MIT was founded sometime in the late 1880s by the very few women students who were allowed to attend MIT at that time. By 1923, the membership included 26 undergraduate women and 23 graduates. Grandma Mac's name appeared among the graduate students.

It is likely that the Cleofan membership, however small, included most of the women at MIT that year. In 1922, in her submittal to the Mount Holyoke Class of 1919 class letter, Evelyn wrote, “I am still with the Physics Department of M.I.T. as a lab assistant. The experiences in such an environment are valuable – perhaps. Ask anyone who has been a co-ed. However Tech is not seriously a coeducational institution, with two thousand men as over against forty girls.”

A wonderful picture of Evelyn among her graduate student counterparts (nearly all men) appears here.

The Revolutionary George McKnight

Our first ancestor in Hebron was George McKnight, who served as Lieutenant under John Williams and Alexander Webster in the Charlotte County militia during the Revolution. As an officer, George would have been an educated man, perhaps, or an experienced soldier, or both. John Williams was a doctor, by far the most well educated man in the area and the clear and obvious choice to command the Regiment. Alexander Webster was a lawyer and may also have had prior experience in battle. All three men can be placed in Hebron (then called "Black Creek") as early as 1773. Webster and McKnight received their commissions in late 1775, and the Williams regiment (called the "Dorset Regiment") was commissioned in February, 1776. Thus George was already serving as a military officer before the signing of the Declaration of Independence in July 1776.

The only personal history of George McKnight that I have found was written in 1868 by Asa Fitch, a local (Salem) entomologist (bug guy) who collected local family histories on the side. He created many family histories, each carefully recorded, numbered and cross-referenced in a neat and steady hand. His manuscripts were never published, but were microfilmed and are available in the Bancroft library. Two of the entries are directly related to our family - numbers 1733, which describes George McKnight, and 1734, which describes his son, James. Be forewarned that both paragraphs contain factual errors, but they are enlightening. Number 1733 is transcribed in full here.

" 1733. Old George McKnight of Hebron – Family.

" I gather the following, from Esq. James McKnight, Hebron, March 9, 1868. He says his father James, was the son of George McKnight, who came from Ireland when a boy to Pennsylvania, and there married Jean Beattie, and had three children, James(¶ 1734), Sally (married Joseph Chambers) and Nelly, wife of Andrew Randles a brother of Hugh Randles.

" He emigrated from Pa. to Hebron, before the Revolutionary War, and took up a large tract of land, 1000 acres I think, in the central point of the town, including part of “Pine Hill” – Alex. Webster joining him and taking a similar tract.

" At the time the country was evacuated, on Burgoyne’s invasion, he went back to his old neighborhood in Pa. with his family (see ¶ 225) going, I think, on horseback, and their dog following on after them. They staid there through the winter and returned the next spring. They did not bring the dog back with them, but when they had been back about six months, the dog came back! A most surprising instance of canine attachment and intelligence.

" When the St. Lawrence country began to attract the attention of settlers from this vicinity, his two sons in law and he got the fever to move to Lisbon, where the lands they thought were far more desirable than his land here. He accordingly sold out everything and moved with them to Lisbon. James, his son, declined going there, which offended the old man so that he would not give him a share of his property, but let his favorite daughters and their husbands have it all. All that James, my father, got of the hundreds of acres of his father’s was 77 acres – this being pay that he was legally entitled to for working for his father from the time he was 21, till the removal – which was the farm on which James afterwards passed his days, and his son George now lives.

" But his favorite sons in law became dissipated and spent the old man’s property, and he came back to Hebron before the War of 1812, and father took care of him the rest of his life. He is buried with the rest of the family in the Town Grave Yard.

" I know nothing of the descendants of my uncles, Chambers and Randles, only that a son, George Randles was years ago Captain of a steam boat running from Ogdenburg down the river to Montreal and Quebec."

Asa Fitch Manuscript, paragraph 1733, copied from microfilm in Bancroft Library, Salem NY, 2003, transcribed August 2010.

Leland and Evelyn McKnight's Short Time Together

To continue my story from last week's post...

Sometime between August, 1931 and October, 1935, Leland McKnight and his wife Evelyn moved from their home in Westfield, New Jersey to the McKnight farm in Hebron, New York with their three young children. The move was necessary because Leland lost his job (a result of the Depression) and, with no income, the young family had to find a way to survive until a suitable job was again available. Moving back to Leland’s childhood home, which was fully paid for and which would provide at least a subsistence living via farming, must have seemed like the best option among very few available to the couple at the time.

The exact date of their move is not known. From the 1930 census, we know that Leland and Evelyn still lived in Westfield in June of 1930. Their youngest child was born in August, 1931, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Leland’s father, Addison, died in 1932 and his death may also have prompted Leland and Evelyn to consider moving back “home” to Hebron, if they had not already done so. Ida McKnight, Addison’s widow, would have been living alone at the farm then and may have welcomed the company – and the help – of her son and his family. Based on remembrances of Leland’s children, Leland lived at the farm at least a few years when they were small, so an arrival in 1932 or 1933 is most likely.

Little is known of Leland and Evelyn’s time together at the farm either, as Leland died in an accident on Thursday, October 16, 1935. After Leland fell from a ladder and hit his head, his daughter (8 years old at the time) remembers running more than a mile to the nearest phone to call for a doctor, while Leland’s six-year old son was sent to a slightly closer neighbor’s home to get immediate help. But there was nothing anyone could do. According to his obituary in the Salem paper the next day, he died early that evening:

“Leland Rea McKnight met a tragic death yesterday afternoon at his home about four miles east of West Hebron. Mr. McKnight was standing on a stepladder which he had placed at the top of the cellar stairs in order to repair a water pipe and when it slipped fell, striking on his head on the cellar bottom with fatal force. The accident happened about 4:30 and he died in the early evening.”

All three of Leland and Evelyn’s children were quite young, but the eldest remembers hearing vague conversations about Leland’s health, along with speculation that he may have had a heart attack, which in turn caused him to fall. No autopsy was ordered, however, so there is no way to confirm any health issues, and the death has always been considered an accidental one.

I do not possess any photos of Leland. Evelyn was not forthcoming with details about her young husband when I asked her about Leland in the late 1970s, and since discussing it continued to upset her even after so many years, I never pressed the issue. She never remarried (although she told me she received at least one offer). She raised all three children at the McKnight farm, cared for her widowed mother-in-law and then her own mother there, and continued to live there as long as she possibly could. She continued to wear her wedding ring for the rest of her days.

On searching - is it the destination, or the journey?

I know I promised more of Leland and Evelyn today, but I need to take a small detour.

A friend of mine has noted that genealogy is not a hobby of answers; it is a hobby of questions. The more information you find, the more there is to know. It seems to never end. Certainly, when a family has lived in the same county for 210 years, as our McKnights did, the record seems positively endless.

I started researching our family histories in 2001. I was bored – I had just quit my job, didn’t have a new one to go to, and needed something to do. Family members have always said that the McKnights had been in Hebron since the Revolution, but nobody remembered the name of the earliest ancestor. The farm was given to the ancestor for service in the Revolution, according to the family. I wondered if I could find out who the ancestor was. I didn’t even know which side he was on. Simple questions really – did he exist? If so was he a patriot or a loyalist? How did he get the land? Online genealogical research hadn’t really started up yet, so I went to the Maryland Historical Society, and looked up “McKnight” in a Revolutionary War name index. Within a matter on minutes I had found a name – 2nd Lieutenant George McKnight, Dorset Regiment, Black Creek Division, under the command of John Williams. It seemed I just might be able to answer those “simple” questions.

There was no way then to know if we were in fact descended from this McKnight soldier, but I had to find out. I started reading books on how to do genealogical research, and looking for evidence that would help me build the entire descendancy chart from George to present day – the “begats” I published a few days ago. The only way to do it was to undertake what’s called a “surname study,” where you look for anyone at all in the town of interest who has the surname you are interested in. Through the actual records you find, you then try to figure out how they are related to one another, if at all. After a lot of work, you usually end up with a big tree of related people, along with some stragglers, and that's what I have. Mine is especially large, because it covered 200 years.

It’s all a big puzzle, really. I started with cemetery records in Hebron and the surrounding areas (my mom got a list of all the McKnights in the Hebron Cemetery in 2002, and I went there in 2003 to study other cemeteries in Bancroft Library). Headstones have a lot of “wife of”, “son of” and “daughter of” designations which helped piece together some of the families. Uncle John gave me a small file of information Grandma Mac had collected over the years. As Ancestry.com brought the censuses online, I was able to start finding McKnight families in Hebron in the census records and, using family names and ages I already knew, I started to fit together which people belonged to what families. A trip to Fort Edward in 2003 turned up early wills that named McKnight children as heirs (including the married names of the daughters – these are shockingly difficult to find otherwise). A thorough review of a resource known as the Asa Fitch Gazetteers and manuscripts added a few details, including a list of James McKnight’s children, and the story of the migration of a portion of the family to Lisbon, NY in the early 1800s. (It also caused some issues, since part of the data in the Fitch papers is – how to say this? – WRONG.)

I’ve spent probably 100 hours putting these families together, based completely on the evidence in the records. As a result, I’m confident that the names, parentages and marriages I have in my tree are accurate. I’m also confident they are incomplete, since I don’t tend to include guesswork and, where the records are so far insufficient, I have to wait to draw conclusions until more data comes in.

Many colonial families have been researched and written up long before now. The Clift family is one such family – it was written up many, many years ago by more than one family historian, and considerably more research by a current researcher has given us much new information to go on. Some of the McKnight information I’ve been able to collect is from very old published histories of Getty and Lytle familes, as well as histories of families with names like Gilchrist, Randles and McClellan. McNitt and McNaughton histories have helped rule out certain people from our ancestry. Town histories from the 1800s have also helped. However, it does not appear that any descendant of George McKnight has ever published a family history. For me that’s both good and bad news. On the one hand, it makes my work harder, because I have to dig for every scrap of information available. The oldest records, like the one pictured, are not and may never be online. Where records don’t exist at all, I may never be able to complete the picture. On the other hand, had the puzzle already been done, this whole exercise would be much less fun.

So the bottom line is, I may never be done. Nevertheless I have to write down what I know, because if I don’t, all my work will be lost to future generations as well. And someday, there will be another one like me, who just really needs to know what brought a soldier named George McKnight to the backwoods of Black Creek, New York in 1770, when only Native Americans and a few really brave pioneers dared live there.

Leland McKnight meets Evelyn Clift

Let’s start with Leland and Evelyn. All the cousins in my generation and the older one knew Evelyn, affectionately called Grandma Mac.

Leland McKnight grew up in West Hebron and went to the West Hebron District 11 school. He got his Bachelor of Engineering degree from Union College in June, 1913. In 1920, he was living with his cousins the Stewarts in Manhattan – Thomas and Mary Stewart, and their children Alvin, Isabel, and Helen. By 1930 (according to US census records) he had moved to Westfields, NJ and lived on Scotch Plains Avenue. Also according to the 1930 census he was a physical engineer doing research work.

Evelyn Clift was born in Irvington, New Jersey. In 1900, at age 2, she was living there with her parents in a house on Cummings St. She went to Mount Holyoke College and graduated with an AB degree in 1919. After teaching physics for a year at Newton High School in Massachusetts, she went to MIT for her Masters of Science degree, which she earned (also in Physics) in 1922. Friends tell us that, while at MIT, she attended lectures by such well-known scientists as Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr. She was inducted into the American Physical Society in December 1922. She taught Physics briefly at MIT in 1922, probably as a grad student, and was also a lab assistant there. Following her graduation she taught physics for an additional 4 years back at her alma mater, Mount Holyoke. She took a brief hiatus in the summer of 1925 for a trip to Europe, returning September 3 into New York City (presumably in time to begin the fall semester back at school).

Nobody seems to know how these two smart people, Leland and Evelyn, met each other. At the time of their engagement, which was announced in a South Hadley paper in January 1926, Leland was a civil engineer at Air Reduction Laboratories in Elizabeth, NJ. Evelyn was a member of the Mt Holyoke faculty, in Massachusetts. How and when did they meet?

However it happened, Evelyn left her job at Mount Holyoke, the two married on July 3, 1926, and went to live an apartment in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In late summer 1928, the couple and their baby daughter moved to a house on Scotch Plains Avenue in Westfield, NJ, where they were still living in 1930, by then with two children.

Questions, family, for you all. How did they meet? Does anyone have a wedding photo?

In the next post, I’ll continue with their lives at the farm…

McKnight Family Ancestry - Male Line

Cousins and siblings, here’s is the entire male line of descent from Grandfather McKnight all the way back to Leiut. George McKnight. The side stories I’ve learned are far more interesting than this simple list of “begats” but I have to start somewhere.

Leland Rea McKnight (1891-1935) m. Evelyn Ogden Clift (1898-1987)

Leland had two siblings, older sister Elsie Jane and younger sister Helen. Leland’s parents were:
Addison McKnight (1865-1932) m. Ida Margaret Rea (1865-1942)

Addison had one known sibling, a younger brother George. Addison’s parents were:
John A. McKnight (1830-1897) m. Cornelia M. Tiplady (1932-1922)

John had three younger sisters that we know of, Maretta, Margaret and Hannah. John’s parents were:
George McKnight (1799-1879) m. Jane McAuley (1802-1883)

George was the third of eight known siblings - their names are William, Elizabeth, George, James, Margaret, Hannah, David, and John. George’s parents were:
James McKnight (around 1770 – 1849) m. Elizabeth Matthews (1776-1835)

James is known to have had three sisters, Hannah, Helena, and Sarah. James’ parents were:
Leiut George McKnight, Revolutionary War officer (around 1741 – 1808) m. Jane Beattie (birthdate unknown, died later than 1808)

What's Happened to the House?

Family, I must share with you my incredibly rewarding experience visiting R & P at the old farmhouse last week. They have done an incredible renovation which I will walk through with you step by step!

First of all, let me say that R & P have done everything in the style of the original house, and it all ties together as if it has always been there. The front porch is now screened in (although that is not new, they did it awhile ago) and, because some of the old maples have died and the house is longer, the garden next to the kitchen window is much larger than it used to be. The hammer head, doorknob and sanding stone are still in the steps.

When you walk in the front door and look to the left into the kitchen, a whole new world opens up! The house has been expanded farther than even the old woodshed used to go, so the kitchen is three times the size it used to be, and beyond it is a sunken sitting room with beautiful stone fireplace and another screened porch! See the new fireplace in the picture? Remember the chimney top on the house used to have the arch like the new one has?

R & P retained, refinished and matched the hardwood floors from the old kitchen. The internal wall of the old kitchen still has the same built-in cabinets, the stairs to the “attic” (more on those later), and Grandma’s old cabinet thing (you know, with the metal work surface and the breadbox in a drawer and the nifty flour sifter thing) so all that is familiar. They even have the old kitchen chairs! Huge new counters with granite countertops fill the rest of the kitchen area, and a small breakfast table sits in front of the window where Grandma used to read in the afternoons. A small birdfeeder hangs on a cable outside just like always! Words cannot describe this space, so I will stop trying.

Back to the dining room you go, and look left into the bathroom. Surprise! No more bathroom! Large, deep shelves have been installed where the bathtub used to be. This is a storage/office/workroom. Very nice. But what about a bathroom?

Go around the corner into the living room and turn right, and into Grandma’s bedroom, and you've just walked into a gorgeous new bathroom! What a great idea! R & P moved the old tub and pedestal sink in there, along with the original towel bars (do you remember them? They were clear, maybe some sort of tempered glass). Grandma’s old closet, which was long and deep, is a library with a full wall of built-in bookshelves.

Upstairs, two of the bedrooms have been combined into one. Uncle John’s old room and the one next to it, and the tiny little hall space leading to them both, are now combined into one large beautiful bedroom. R & P chose to keep and re-use all the chestnut doors, so the hallway looks like it has always been this way. The little green bedroom with the sailboats on the walls has been painted and is another guest room.

The real treat awaits when you walk into Del’s room. Remember it? Dark, low, low ceiling, one tiny window to the right. The ceiling here has been RAISED and Del’s room is now a beautiful, light and bright bathroom with another free-standing tub and pedestal sink R found in an old house that was being dismantled. Large new windows, front and back. Tile shower. With the exception of the shower (it extends into the old attic space) the bathroom takes up the floor space of Del’s old room, but it feels MUCH bigger because the ceiling is high.

From Del’s room/bathroom, you may remember there was a door into the attic, and when you went into the attic the stairs went down to the kitchen to your right. R & P have retained this, but where the attic used to be is a small hallway. Remember, the ceiling here is all full-height now, not low and dark. To the left, storage; to the right, a very small bedroom. Straight ahead, a huge, bright, office/workroom that sits above the entire new kitchen, with little windows the look down into the sunken sitting room. Beautiful!

The are in back of the house is unrecognizable. The back porch is exactly where it always was, but rebuilt, about a foot deeper, but otherwise replaced exactly as the original. On the back porch is one of Grandma’s old green benches. The ice-house has been restored and moved to the garden, and in its place is a huge terraced gravel patio. The lawn – which you will remember ended just a few feet behind the ice house – has been extended quite a distance into the old field, all the way along the back of the house and along the back of the flower garden, which makes the whole space seem huge. Did you know there is a big old apple tree that used to be hidden down in the brush? It’s now in the yard.

An amazing experience, and this barely scratches the surface. R & P are fantastic hosts. Email me for more pictures.

Inaugural post

I've recently learned a lot about the McKnight family and also about the Clift family. I think the best way to tell people what I've learned is to write it in this blog. Eventually, maybe I can make it into a book. In the meantime, this is the best way to share.

The McKnight family I have been researching resided on a farm at McKnight Hill Road in West Hebron, NY (post office: Salem) beginning sometime before 1773, and through 1986. Wonderful friends now live there and are welcome here as adopted family.

Please let me know you were here, comment if you feel moved to do so, and subscribe to the blog if you are interested in hearing all the details I've learned.