Monday, April 25, 2011

New York Tombstone

The next day after visiting Deerfield, we took a driving tour of Connecticut all the way down to Long Island Sound, to find a number of cemeteries and the tombstones of my ancestors, which I found through the use of Find A Grave. I hadn't put any thought into this before, but someone pointed out to me by e-mail that the tombstone of one of my ancestors still existed at Rock City Falls. We made this stop before we went to the conference.

Rock City Falls is on Route 29 West of Saratoga Springs, NY. We had no problem finding the cemetery as we had the GPS coordinates. When we arrived at the cemetery we asked ourselves, how are we going to find the tombstone? However, we knew it was old and we knew what it looked like. So while I was taking some photographs, my wife
wandered off and had located the tombstone about 2 minutes later. The ancestors in question were my 5th great-grandparents Deacon Daniel Rathbun b. Feb. 27, 1731 d. Jan. 17, 1823 and his wife Sarah Higby (1736-1835). The GPS reading for the tombstone is Lat. N 43.04943 Long. W -73.91841. Daniel's tombstone was still readable but the one for his wife was laying flat on the ground and the lettering was very worn but sort of readable with much difficulty.

We did a little drive around and found a historic plaque which I photographed and transcribed below.
Rock City Falls
V. Rathbun settled pre-1800.
Area grew around early saw,
grist mills; stores; hotels;
schools; 1810 Methodist Ch.;
mid - 1800 paper mills Kilmer,
West; P.O.; Catholic Ch. 1872.

I decided to take a quick tour of the town and turned left and found the Rock City Falls Post Office. I went in and met a very nice lady whose name was Emigh (pronounced Amy). She knew that the name Emigh was a Palatine name going back to the 1709/1710 Palatine emigration to New York State. She knew about the Rathbun connection to Rock City Falls and gave me a contact, her father or father-in-law who was 94 then. I will write and say thank you. We also found the Town of Milton offices where we obtained the name of the local historian.

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