Day 20

We were up early and off to the AAUW book warehouse. We, and six other volunteers, worked like Trojans sorting books. I worked with Peter, a VISTA volunteer, to stack packed boxes. We were dripping wet and thoroughly dirty by noon. We managed to find a dim, cool restaurant at 1pm for lunch. They couldn’t see how wet we were. Then it was home for a one hour rest before tackling the boxes of genealogy.

You need to know that this has been a nonstop effort for days. Louise and I worked from 3pm until 11pm going looking at, notating and shooting photographs of all the old memorabilia. (Thus my late blog posting.) We must be very grateful to gg Davenport, gg Tukey and the rest of the descendents for saving so much material.

The highlights from the day must include the stash of tintypes and daguerreotypes found in an old tin box of the Sutton and Davenport families. Below is Alanson Davenport and his wife Eliza Middaugh – both born in the late 1700s.

The next treasure was George Washington Coats’ family Bible. It is a huge, heavy tome but inside are recorded births and deaths for his children and relatives plus at the back – more photos. There are 8 of children from the 1860s that are not labeled. I think I will post them on ancestry.com and see if anyone can identify them.

In contrast to this book, was Levi R. Sutton’s New Testament. Bound in

leather it is fragile but still legible.

Finally, there was the genealogy from John W. Tukey, the Princeton statistician with letters from him to HBT, a letter with family history from Stephen H. Tukey, James Bradford’s father, our gg grandfather, information that may lead us to solving a mystery about John Tukey (evidence now points to him coming from Massachusetts (qualifying him as an immigrant) and his parents/grandparents coming from England in the 1600s – he probably came from Mass. to Maine in 1744), PLUS huge handwritten copies from Portland, ME of a book by Nathan Goold on the history of the John Tukey family. I have been looking for this book for months. Needless to say we are spending the morning at the copy shop before I leave! What an exhausting, exhilarating day.