Okay, I admit it; I have an addictionβ¦. Last year I finally broke down and purchased a membership. I have used it for researching my own family tree, but I primarily use it to research people who lived in the town of Schaghticoke.
The history of our country was made by primarily by the small actions of individuals, and the more I can find out about them, the deeper our knowledge about the town and its development. For the past months, I have been trying to find out all I can about the men from Schaghticoke who fought in the U. Civil War. Using those documents plus some others, I have been able to find out quite a lot about some of the men. And sometimes what I find is not about the Civil War at all, but so revelatory about either the people or their society.
I looked at a Joice family in the city of Troy in , trying to find where Patrick had come from. Eight women, ranging in age from 17 to 16, had prostitute as their occupation. The house, which was listed in the Troy directory as a saloon, was at the corner of Liberty and Hill Street in Troy, a rough part of town.
Just one more example⦠I researched a man named Edward Pinkham, who died in Schaghticoke in He was in a New Hampshire Regiment during the Civil War, after which his family moved to Schaghticoke, where his father James was superintendent of the woolen factory. The first surprise in researching him was to find a full-length photo of him as a young lieutenant in the war online.
The second surprise was that though I knew that the family was in Schaghticoke from about through the midth century, I found that Edward and his younger brother Herbert went to Abilene, Kansas, about , to open a grocery store. Abilene would have been on the frontier at that time. Wild Bill Hickock was Marshall of the rowdy town in That foray to the Wild West certainly gives a new dimension to our thoughts about the Pinkham family.
